nancylebov | Hunter-gatherer societies could get complex

http://www.archaeology.org/9909/abstracts/hunter.html

Watson Brake, it wrote, "challenges traditional ideas about early American cultures and suggests that pre-agricultural, pre-ceramics hunting societies were more socially complex than previously thought." Most people think of hunter-gatherers as small bands of people roaming the landscape in search of food, incapable of such ambitious projects, but over the past two decades archaeologists have learned that many hunter-gatherers did the same things that only agricultural societies were supposed to have done. They built large buildings, had big settlements with permanent chiefs, developed elaborate artistic and technological traditions, made war, and managed their land to get as much food out of it as possible. In short, they were socially complex.

Link thanks to

neutronjockey.

More about Watson Brake.

I'd been suspecting that we didn't think enough about what hunter-gatherer societies on good land might be like.