Forager-Traders in South and Southeast Asia: Long-Term Histories

by Kathleen D. Morrison (Editor)

Specialized forager-traders have lived alongside and in exchange relationships with agriculturalists for many thousands of years in South and Southeast Asia. Here is a series of representative case-studies that pertain to a current archaeological debate. The issue concerns the extent to which historical foraging populations are to be understood as specialized adaptations to a complex economically diverse environment, rather than as throw-backs to a Paleolithic way of life.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published December 4, 1998

About the author

(PhD, UC Berkeley 1992) Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College and Director of the Center for International Studies, studies the archaeology and historical anthropology of South Asia with a focus on precolonial and early colonial South India. Her interests include state formation and power relations, agricultural organization and change, colonialism and imperialism, landscape history, anthropology of food and stable isotope analysis, urban-rural relations, botanical analysis, Holocene hunting and gathering, and the integration of archaeological, historical, and ecological analysis.