Friday, May 1, 2015

Compare Foragers and Collectors found in Primitive Societies

Lewis Binford also made a distinction between collectors and foragers, which is also a continuum instead of a dichotomy. Foragers are more mobile, often living in areas where all necessary resources can be found within a small radius of any campsite they go to. When they are done foraging at one site, the entire camp will move a short distance to the next one.

Collectors, on the other hand, are found in places where positioning the camp close to one resource will increase the distance from another resource. Thus, collectors must send teams off to hunt the other resource (usually migratory herds of animals) and send it back. For collectors, adapting to seasonal and spatial variability is crucial, so storage is much more important. Collectors move less, and when they do move, they move greater distances. There's a whole set of vocabulary associated with optimal strategies of gathering food, as well as the different kinds of sites that foragers and collectors leave behind as their archaeological footprint. In general, collectors will live in higher latitudes and foragers closer to the Equator, but the distribution relies more on the distribution of resources and patterns of symbolism in culture than a simple latitudinal cline.

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