hazelnuts

In his 2002 book Genes, Memes and Human History, Stephan Shennan describes how hunter-fisher-gatherer societies are often studied in an evolutionary biological context. Those societies with an agricultural subsistence base are, however, more often then not looked at from a more social and theoretical point of view. He also mentions how this division is strengthened by the divided archaeological community; one fraction focussing on foragers, the other on agricultural societies.

Obviously, this is a totally undesirable situation. Shennan quotes Richard Bradley’s comment that “… Neolithic farmers had social relations with one another, while their Mesolithic forager predecessors had ecological relations with hazel nuts.”

I leave the answering of the question whether we should push social archaeology backwards or evolutionary archaeology forwards to you kind readers.