Making places in the world: An ethnographic review and archaeologic perspective on hunter-gatherer relationships with trees

Abstract

Despite the importance of trees in the lives of hunter-gatherers, the economic, cultural, and spiritual roles of trees have been seldom explored empirically or theoretically. What research exists on the topic has mostly focused on economic aspects, especially firewood management, consumption of edible tree products, and tool manufacture. Here, we summarize data collected from 104 ethnographies on hunter-gatherers to analyze their relationships with trees. We focus principally on 14 societies from South America and two living in deserts in Australia and Africa, to achieve an environmental comparative perspective. We demonstrate that trees provided hunter-gatherers with multiple benefits that were not based on extraction, but also on conservation. Among these benefits are shade, temperature regulation, protection, recreation, using trees as parts of habitation structures, and soil fertilization. With these data we examine the roles that trees might have played as important constituents of places. We propose that it is possible to assess human-tree relationships at different geographic scales archaeologically. Moreover, based in the collected ethnographic data, archaeologists should consider past distribution of trees to understand hunter-gatherer settlement patterns, since trees appear to always have provided with immovable benefits, especially related to shelter.