The History of Americanist Hunter-Gatherer Research

Abstract

This chapter, the second of two detailing historical approaches to hunter-gatherers, centers on American schools of thought from approximately 1600 to 1960. We describe the continuing influence of progressive social evolutionary theory as anthropology became a formal discipline and generally forward-thinking policy-makers were forced to confront “the past” as encounters with living hunter-gatherers were reported from the frontier. The turn of the twentieth century brought recognition of both Native Americans’ long history in the New World and considerable variation among hunter-gatherer groups—past and contemporary—as well as a discipline-wide shift in focus from inevitable, unilineal evolution to normative classification schemes that were more ecologically nuanced and interested in adaptation but, ultimately, ill-equipped to address processes of cultural change or truly Darwinian conceptions of cultural evolution. The new archaeology sought to address this, specifically.