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Marking the Land investigates how hunter-gatherers use physical landscape markers and environmental management to impose meaning on the spaces they occupy. The land is full of meaning for hunter-gatherers. Much of that meaning is inherent in natural phenomena, but some of it comes from modifications to the landscape that hunter-gatherers themselves make. Such alterations may be intentional or unintentional, temporary or permanent, and they can carry multiple layers of meaning, ranging from practical signs that provide guidance and information through to less direct indications of identity or abstract, highly symbolic signs of sacred or ceremonial significance. This volume investigates the conditions which determine the investment of time and effort in physical landscape marking by hunter-gatherers, and the factors which determine the extent to which these modifications are symbolically charged. Considering hunter-gatherer groups of varying sociocultural complexity and scale, Marking the Land provides a systematic consideration of this neglected aspect of hunter-gatherer adaptation and the varied environments within which they live.
List of contents
1. Hunter-Gatherer Landscape Perception and Landscape “Marking”: The Multidimensional Construction of Meaning
William A. Lovis and Robert Whallon
Section I: The Northern Latitudes2. Initializing the Landscape: Chipewyan Construction of Meaning in a Recently Occupied Environment
Robert Jarvenpa and Hetty Jo Brumbach
3. Places on the Blackfoot Homeland: Markers of Cosmology, Social Relationships and History
Gerald A. Oetelaar
4. Markers in Space and Time: Reflections on the Nature of Place Names as Events in the Inuit Approach to the Territory
Claudio Aporta
5. Inuksuk, Sled Shoe, Placename: Past Inuit Ethnogeographies
Peter J. Whitridge
6. Network Maintenance in Big Rough Spaces with Few People: The Labrador Innu-Naskapi or Montagnais
William A. Lovis
Section II: The Southern Latitudes7. Physical and Linguistic Marking of the Seri Landscape – Are They Connected?
Carolyn K. O’Meara
8. Bonescapes: Engaging People and Land with Animal Bones among South American Tropical Foragers
Gustavo G. Politis
9. Unfolding Cultural Meanings: Wayfinding Practices Among the San of the Central Kalahari
Akira Takada
10. Continuity and Change in Warlpiri Practices of Marking the Landscape
Petronella Vaarzon-Morel
11. Signaling Presence: How Batek and Penan Hunter-Gatherers in Malaysia Mark the Landscape
Lye Tuck Po
Section III: Synthesis12. Marked Sacred Places of Hunter-Gatherer Bands
Robert Whallon
13. Hunter-Gatherer Landscape Perception and Landscape “Marking”: The Multidimensional Construction of Meaning
Robert Whallon and William A. Lovis
About the author
William Lovis, Professor, Department of Anthropology and Curator of Anthropology, MSU Museum, Michigan State University
Robert Whallon, Professor, Department of Anthropology and Curator of Mediterranean Prehistory, Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, University of Michigan
Summary
Marking the Land investigates physical landscape marking by hunter-gatherers. When and why do hunter-gatherer groups of varying sociocultural complexity and scale place markers on their landscape? When and why are such markers limited to simple, informational signs? When and why are markers invested with symbolic meaning? And when and w
