RAPID: Time Critical Preservation of Hunter-Gatherer Ethnographic Data

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

The anthropological study and documentation of the few remaining foraging (or, hunter-gatherer) societies is essential for understanding the full range of past and present human ways of life. 12,000 years ago, all people on earth were foragers; today, fewer than one-hundredth of one percent are. Modern foragers differ in significant ways from ancient foragers; nonetheless, they provide us the best data we have on what human life was like before the transformations wrought by the agricultural and industrial revolutions. This RAPID award supports the time sensitive compilation, preservation, and publication of a critically endangered but highly significant corpus of scientific data on Hadza foragers in Tanzania. The data were collected over two decades (1995-2005) by anthropologist Dr. Frank Marlowe and his collaborators in the 24 camps occupied by the approximately 400 Hadza who maintained a forager way of life. Guided by the theoretical framework of human behavioral ecology, these data include camp censuses, household censuses, anthropometry, reproductive histories, focal individual observation data ("focal follows"), GPS data, records of food brought to camp, observational scans, interviews, and high quality film footage. Dr. Brian M. Wood (Yale University), Dr. Colette Berbesque (Roehampton University), and Dr. Alyssa Crittenden (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), who were trained by and worked alongside Dr. Marlowe, will compile, catalogue, code, and prepare for preservation all of the Marlowe Hadza materials, which will then be made available to other scholars now and in the future through a public data catalogue.