Introduction

Abstract

By and large, recent anthropological analyses of human adaptations to the natural environment emphasize three topics: diet, technology, and settlement patterns. This is particularly true in archaeological research and is virtually universal in archaeological research on hunters and gatherers.

The fates of individual nations have often been seen to hinge on chance: on the career of a remarkable man, on a code of morality perfectly suited to the times; on the happenstance of battle. It would be a dried-out person who wished to deny the roles these things have played as arbiters of our fate. But chance acts only on the stage set for it by the fundamental ecological nature of the human kind. Great leaders, fine moralities, or superior weapons of war are important only as they act on populations and ways of life that then exist. It is these populations and habits which we can understand from ecological principles. —Colinvaux 1980:13