Nukak

Ethnoarchaeology of an Amazonian People

Gustavo Politis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315423395
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From Gustavo Politis, one of the most renowned South American archaeologists, comes the first in-depth study in English of the last "undiscovered" people of the Amazon. His work is groundbreaking and urgent, both because of encroaching guerrilla violence that makes Nukak existence perilously fragile, and because his work with the Nukak represented one of the last opportunities to conduct research with hunter-gatherers using contemporary methodological and the theoretical tools. Through a rich and comprehensive ethno-archaeological portrait of material culture "in the making," this work makes methodological and conceptual advances in the interpretation of hunter-gather societies. Politis's conclusions, based on six years of original research and on comparative analysis, are integrative and contribute to the identification of the multiple factors involved in the formation of hunter-gatherer archaeological assemblages.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations
• Tables
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theory and Methods: Ethics and Techniques
• 3. Sociopolitical Organization and Cosmology
• 4. Shelters and Camps
• 5. The Use of Space and Discard Patterns
• 6. Residential and Logistical Mobility: Daily Foraging Trips
• 7. Traditional Technology
• 8. Subsistence
• 9. Animal Exploitation, Processing, and Discard
• 10. Final Considerations
• Appendix I. Sample of Daily Foraging Trips
• Appendix II. Patterns of Bone Representation and Surface Bone Modification Caused by Nukak Prey Acquisition by Gustavo A. Martínez
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author