hunter-gatherer society

writer

nationality

Australian

French

occupation / innovator as

anthropologist

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris)

engineer

 shares with agricultural societies sedentarity, demographic density, slavery, differentiation. They also caught an abundance of food which they stored for the remainder of the year (not unlike grain).

His book The Hunter-Gatherers, or the Origins of Social Inequalities (1982) [8] rapidly became a classic among prehistorians. It revisits the classical opposition between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalist (or horticulturalist). This opposition was accepted as valid in both ethnology and prehistoric archeology, as was the notion of the 'neolithic revolution' earlier advanced by V. Gordon Childe: a radical transformation of social and economic structures that was said to mark the transition from an economy of gathering and hunting to one based on the domestication of plants and crops. In his book, Alain Testart points out that more than half of the hunter-gatherer societies known to ethnology, in fact, share the same characteristics as agricultural societies: a sedentary society which indicates village life... an increased demographic density (higher than neighboring agriculturalist)... significant hierarchies, including slavery and the differentiation in social strata such as nobles and commoners. These are typically the American Indians of the Pacific coast, of California and the peoples of Southeastern Siberia. These peoples, who only exploit wild (undomesticated) food resources like salmon, acorns etc., collect them in large quantities during the season of abundance and store them in order to provide for sufficient foodstuffs during the remainder of the year. These hunter-gatherers live on their stored food just as the agriculturalist live on the reserves of grain they keep in their barns or silos.' (wikipedia

is one who has nothing to say, but what counts is the way he says it.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it. (Alain Robbe-Grillet)

Alain TestartThinkers

Alain Testart