The Reality of Hunter-Gatherers w/ Dr. Robert Kelly
Rewilding is about seeking a reciprocal relationship to the environment and to one another. Material and cultural conditions kept humans in relative check with their ecologies for potentially millions of years, so what were they? If we are to understand this, we must hold up a lens and look at the diversity of hunter-gatherers (both past and present) to fully realize what their cultural and environmental limitations were–and are–today. Why did some abandon that way of life while others have fought to the death to defend it? What led humans to switch from one subsistence strategy to another, and what were the social and ecological effects of these changes? Is it possible to fully know? What do we know? To talk about these core rewilding questions with me, is Dr. Robert Kelly.
Dr. Kelly first became involved in archaeology in 1973, as a high school student. He received his BA from Cornell University in anthropology in 1978, his MA from the University of New Mexico in 1980, and his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1985. He has taught at various Colleges since 1986; from 1997 until retirement in 2023 he taught at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Kelly is the author of over 100 articles, books, and reviews, including The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, The Fifth Beginning, and Archaeology, the most widely used college textbook in the field. He is a past president of the Society for American Archaeology, past editor of American Antiquity, North America’s primary archaeological journal, and past secretary of the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. He has been a distinguished lecturer at many universities around the country and the world, including Argentina, Germany, France, Finland, Norway, Japan, and China, and he has worked on archaeological projects in Nevada, California, New Mexico, Kentucky, Georgia, Maine, Chile and, for the past 25 years, Wyoming and Montana. He has received over two million dollars in funding, with multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. Since 1973, the archaeology, ethnology, and ethnography of foraging peoples has been at the center of his research.
Notes:
Robert Kelly, Professor Archaeology at University of Wyoming
The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum (Revised)
CARTA: Violence in Human Evolution – Robert Kelly: Do Hunter-Gatherers Tell Us About Human Nature?
ANTHRO, ART, (CLOVIS) and the APOCALYPSE: Live from the field with Dr. ROBERT KELLY | DIH Podcast #1
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