Session: #375

Content:

Mobility is seen as key to understand Stone Age lifeways and subsistence of hunter-gatherer-fisher communities. A large variety of different aspects is summarized in the concept of mobility.
Economical decisions are important motives for hunter-gatherer mobility. This has repeatedly been shown, using, for instance, ethnographic analogies (e.g. Groß et al. 2019) or theoretical constructions, as the marginal value theorem (e.g. Venkataraman et al. 2017). Applied to archaeological sites, a reconstruction of the local environment is quite often available and thus allows us to develop further analysis and theories regarding prehistoric movements in a landscape (e.g. Boethius et al. 2022).
However, other important aspects are harder to trace archaeologically: Where are the borders of mobility (physically and mentally)? When did people stop and turn around? Can we trace the reasons for these limits of mobility, which in turn result in regional behavior? At which point did orientation strategies like piloting and homing (Golledge 2003) as well as traditions, songs, or stories may have played a part in everyday mobility?
In this session, we want to discuss and shed light on as many aspects of mobility in hunter-gatherer-fisher communities as possible. We welcome a wide range of contributions (from ethnographic to archaeological and computational methods), considering not only the different environments in which the foraging communities lived, like open steppe-like environments, forests, mountainous landscapes, and maritime areas but also look at different methods and means of analysis, e.g. origin of raw materials, shape of sites, rhythmicity of settlement, navigation or theoretical attempts. Single case studies are welcomed as well.

Session: #375

Theme & Session Format

Title & Content

Organisers