The Evolution of Complex Hunter-Gatherers

Abstract

When Russians made contact with the natives of Kodiak (Kodiak Alutiiq or Koniag)¹ in the second half of the 18th century, they encountered one of the most densely populated and militarily impenetrable societies in the North Pacific (Burch, 1988b). For two decades, unsuccessful trading ventures and military resistance forced Russian fur traders to bypass the Kodiak Archipelago in search of more profitable interactions elsewhere (Black, 1988). Kodiak’s Alutiiq and their neighbors, the Eastern Aleutian (Fox) islanders as well as several Northwest Coast “tribes,” such as the Tlingit, shared characteristics such as intertribal warfare, prestige economies including long distance trade in prestige valuables, institutionalized social inequality (social ranking), and slavery. Like these other neighboring groups, Kodiak’s inhabitants subsisted on a mix of fish, sea mammals, shellfish, birds, and plant products. In the traditional terminology of anthropologists, they were hunter-gatherers, but not typical of hunter-gatherers as they have been best known to ethnographers of the 20th century. These were relatively complex hunter-gatherers.