Book Length Syntheses, Reviews and Collections
Bettinger, Robert L. 2009. Hunter-Gatherer Foraging: Five Simple Models. Clinton Corners, NY: Eliot Werner Publications.
A beautifully written and consistently lucid primer on five core foraging models (diet breadth, linear programming, caching, technological investment, and field processing), each illustrated with a worked example step-by-step. Cogent for beginner and expert alike.
Bettinger, Robert L., Raven Garvey, and Shannon Tushingham. 2015 [1991]. Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and Evolutionary Theory, Second Edition. New York: Springer.
In this second edition, Bettinger is joined by two of his recent PhD advisees. A critical and historical review of Marxist, cultural ecology and behavioral ecology approaches to the study of hunter-gatherers. The authors write from the perspective of archaeologists assaying the relative analytical merits of each of the three scholarly traditions.
Dahlberg, Frances, ed. 1981. Woman the Gatherer. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Among other efforts to balance the neglect of women’s contributions to foraging societies, their evolution and form, this collection focuses on female roles in primate and hominin groups, along with four ethnographic examples (Agta, Australian Aboriginals, Mbuti and Chipewyan). An early response to the pre-occupations signaled by the term Man the Hunter (Lee and DeVore, ads., below) and a reminder that hunter-gatherer studies remain to this day encumbered by a long history of unevenly gendered attentions.
Kelly, Robert L. 2013 [1995]. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Update of his earlier, The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways).
Archaeologist Bob Kelly documents the great diversity found among hunter-gatherer societies in such basic socio-economic features as diet, group size, permanence of residential settlement, and mobility. Kelly argues that processual archaeology and behavioral ecology approaches complement one another in their explanatory strengths.
Koster, Jeremy, Brooke Scleza, and Mary K. Shenk, eds. 2022. Human Behavioral Ecology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in press).
A coincidence of cover design and their enduring relevance as references, W&S (1981) and S&W (1992) are sometimes called the “green bibles” of hunter-gatherer behavioral ecology. Koster, Scleza and Shenk (eds.) is an update of greatly expanded breadth, already nicknamed the “green bible 3.” Look for it on a newsstand near you late 2022.
Krebs, John R., and Nicholas B. Davies, eds. 1978, 1984, 1991, & 1997. Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th eds., respectively. Oxford: Blackwell.
Despite the repeated title and numbering as editions, chapters in each of these successive volumes feature new authors and topics, with some circling back as merited by research advances. Behavioral ecology as written for biologists but essential sources too for social scientists seeking to apply the approach to human adaptation and behavior. Curiously, they all have green or blue-green covers (see entry for Koster, Scleza and Shenk).
Lee, Richard Borshay, and Irven DeVore, eds. 1968. Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.
The foundational document of contemporary hunter-gatherer studies, based on a 1966 Wenner-Gren Symposium that highlighted field-defining shifts in perceptions of hunter-gatherer lifeways while inadvertently signaling that the intellectual transformation was partial (see Dahlberg, ed., 1981). The inspiration for an ongoing series of subsequent international hunter-gatherer specialist symposia known as CHAGS (Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies), the 13th of which is scheduled for the summer of 2022 at University College Dublin. See RK Hitchcock (2019) for a full list of the meetings and resulting publications [“Hunters and Gatherers Past and Present: Perspectives on Diversity, Teaching, and Information Transmission.” Reviews in Anthropology 48(1): 5-37 (Table 2)].
Lee, Richard B., and Richard Daly, eds. 1999. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Succinct, ~5 page ethnographic profiles of 53 hunter-gatherer societies, each entry following a standardized format covering history, ecological setting, economy, settlement pattern, marriage and gender, kinships and political organization, world-view and ritual life, and recent situation, with a reading list appended. Each continent gets an introductory essay and an archaeological summary; a “special topics” section covers history and social theory, cross-cultural perspectives and contemporary politics.
Panter-Brick, Catherine, Robert H. Layton, and Peter A. Rowley-Conwy, eds. 2001. Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eleven, accessible, interdisciplinary chapters covering topics as diverse as behavioral ecology, economics and affluence, technology, antiquity, language, demography, nutrition, health, art and contemporary politics. The editors represent the subfields of human biology, ethnography and archaeology.
Smith, Eric Alden, and Bruce Winterhalder, eds. 1992. Evolutionary Ecology and Human Behavior. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
The decade+ following W&S (1981, below) was highly productive of studies that adapted foraging theory and behavioral ecology approaches to questions of hunter-gatherer behavior. Eric Smith and I felt a more thorough introduction to the approach and that of cultural evolution (chs. 1-3, here), updated coverage of empirical studies, and recognition of new topic areas — time allocation, collective action, social stratification, reproductive decisions and population dynamics, among them — were merited.
Winterhalder, Bruce, and Eric Alden Smith, eds. 1981. Hunter-Gatherer Foraging Strategies: Ethnographic and Archeological Analyses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ten papers introducing human applications of foraging theory to an anthropological and archaeological audience, outgrowth of a 1978 American Anthropological Association symposium, most of the speakers relatively new PhDs. The ethnographic analyses especially continue to be informative and useful.
Article Length Reviews
Bird, Douglas W., and James F. O’Connell. 2006. “Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology.” Journal of Archaeological Research 14:143–88.
Boone, James L., and Eric Alden Smith. 1998. “Is It Evolution yet? A Critique of Evolutionary Archaeology.” Current Anthropology 39:S141–73.
Borgerhoff Mulder, Monique. 1987. “Adaptation and Evolutionary Approaches to Anthropology.” Man 22:25–41.
Borgerhoff Mulder, Monique. 1988. “Behavioural Ecology in Traditional Societies.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 3(10):260–64.
Borgerhoff Mulder, Monique. 1991. “Human Behavioural Ecology.” Pp. 69–98 in Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, 3rd ed, edited by J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies. Oxford: Blackwell.
Broughton, Jack M., and James F. O’Connell. 1999. “On Evolutionary Ecology, Selectionist Archaeology, and Behavioral Archaeology.” American Antiquity 64(1):153–65.
Codding, Brian F., and Douglas W. Bird. 2015. “Behavioral Ecology and the Future of Archaeological Science.” Journal of Archaeological Science 56:9–20. doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2015.02.027.
Hawkes, Kristen, James F. O’Connell, and Lisa Rogers. 1997. “The Behavioral Ecology of Modern Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 12:29–32.
Hawkes, Kristen, James O’Connell, and Nicholas Blurton Jones. 2018. “Hunter‐gatherer Studies and Human Evolution: A Very Selective Review.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 165(4):777–800. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.23403.
Nettle, Daniel, Mhairi A. Gibson, David W. Lawson, and Rebecca Sear. 2013. “Human Behavioral Ecology: Current Research and Future Prospects.” Behavioral Ecology 24(5):1041–42.
O’Connell, James F. 1995. “Ethnoarchaeology Needs a General Theory of Behavior.” Journal of Archaeological Research 3:205–55.
Smith, Eric Alden. 1983. “Anthropological Applications of Optimal Foraging Theory: A Critical Review.” Current Anthropology 24(5):625–51.
Smith, Eric A., and Bruce Winterhalder. 2002. “Evolutionary Social Science: The Behavioral Ecology Approach.” Samfundsøkonomen 4:13–21.
Smith, Eric Alden. 1992a. “Human Behavioral Ecology: I.” Evolutionary Anthropology 1:20–25.
Smith, Eric Alden. 1992b. “Human Behavioral Ecology: II.” Evolutionary Anthropology 1(2):50–55.
Smith, Eric Alden. 2000. “Three Styles in the Evolutionary Analysis of Human Behavior.” Pp. 27–46 in Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, edited by L. Cronk, N. A. Chagnon, and W. Irons. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Smith, Eric Alden, and Bruce Winterhalder. 2006. “Human Behavioral Ecology.” Pp. 377–85 in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, edited by L. Nadel. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Winterhalder, Bruce. 2002. “Behavioral and Other Human Ecologies: Critique, Response and Progress through Criticism.” Journal of Ecological Anthropology 6:4–23.
Winterhalder, Bruce, and Eric Alden Smith. 2000. “Analyzing Adaptive Strategies: Human Behavioral Ecology at Twenty-Five.” Evolutionary Anthropology 9:51–72.