This groundbreaking study focuses on the architecture—including blinds, drive lanes, animal corrals, and fishing weirs—hunter gatherers used to increase their success beginning at the end of the last Ice Age, some 14,000 years ago. Many of these structures are massive in nature, employing dozens of people to construct, maintain, and operate. That required a level of organization and sophistication often underestimated by archaeologists.
The author, Ashley Lemke, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, has produced a comprehensive study of this important phenomenon. This book has two parts. The first surveys ancient hunting architecture around the world across a broad spectrum of cultures, time, geography, and environments. Similar strategies are often used in far-flung places to hunt many species including bison, caribou, guanacos, antelope, and gazelles. Rather than operating solely in small, mobile bands, many hunter gatherers came together in complex groups to produce this architecture and to harvest large quantities of game and fish. Some of these structures are massive wooden fences or stone walls two or three miles long in the shape of a letter V that concentrated prey into a small area where dozens, or even hundreds, could be killed to feed a large group of people.
The second part of this book focuses on the author’s research in and around the ancient Great Lakes, particularly the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, which is now under eighty to 120 feet of water in Lake Huron. After the glaciers retreated, from about 10,500 to 8,300 years ago, this ridge was dry land some nine miles wide and seventy-five miles long, covering about 617,000 acres. A team from the University of Michigan has been surveying the Alpena-Amberley Ridge for the past decade using both remote underwater technology and scuba diving surveys. Preservation of both wooden and stone hunting architecture in the lake environment is outstanding, and the team discovered numerous hunting structures aimed at harvesting large numbers of caribou. These hunting constructions include blinds, V-shaped drives, corrals, and other features, many organized in very complex configurations that would require many people to operate. These structures support the growing realization that hunter gatherer societies were much more complex than archaeologist have hitherto acknowledged. When you add this information to the recognition of large hunter gatherer communities like Poverty Point in Louisiana, a new picture begins to emerge.
