"Ethnoarchaeology of Hunter-Gatherer Technology in Venezuela." Dr. Greaves.

Continuing with our annual Ancestors lecture, the Maxwell Museum is honored to welcome Dr. Russell Greaves, Director of the Maxwell Museum's Office of Contract Archaeology. Event co-sponsored by the UNM Department of Anthropology.

Ethnoarchaeology of Hunter-Gatherer Technology in Venezuela: Behavioral, Material, and Archival Approaches

This presentation combines ethnoarchaeological fieldwork, examination of multiple museum collections, and archival documents to address strategic use of women’s and men’s foraging tools and food acquisition techniques. Behavior observational data on the use of subsistence technologies among Savanna Pumé hunters and gatherers of the Orinoco Plains (llanos) of Venezuela provide quantified views of foraging activities, mobility, time allocation, food returns, and actual tool use between 1990 and 2007.

Investigations of museum collections spanning the late 19th -mid 20th centuries offer glimpses of temporal changes in material availability, manufacture, and potentially tool roles for comparison with my ethnoarchaeological fieldwork. Additional research of archival sources from the 17th-19th centuries provides further perspectives on contrasting and similar past foraging practices. This multi-layered approach moves beyond the common ethnoarchaeological emphasis on tool manufacture to combine data elucidating technological strategies of implement design, use, and role flexibility.

Search strategies and mobility distances are important variables conditioning how tools are used, often beyond their apparent functional designs. Additionally, longitudinal fieldwork across 30 months, examination of multiple Pumé collections, and documents from early Spanish military and missionary observations helps situate this ethnoarchaeological study in a deeper time frame more appropriate to the nature of the archaeological record than just the ethnographic present.

The public lecture is co-sponsored by the UNM Department of Anthropology and the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.

Dr. Russell Greaves is a Research Associate with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and a Consulting Scholar with the American Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Dr. Greaves is an archaeologist with over 35 years experience, primarily in the American West. He has worked extensively in the US Great Plains and Southwest, focusing on hunter-gatherer archaeology but also has significant experience with agricultural society archaeology of the Southwest and Mississippian sites.

Dr. Greaves has been involved with many innovative Paleoindian excavations, including the Folsom type-site in New Mexico. His areas of archaeological expertise include geoarchaeology, stone tool studies, past subsistence research through faunal and botanical remains, and ethnoarchaeology. He has performed long-term ethnoarchaeological and behavioral ecology research with Pumé foragers of Venezuela since 1990. He also has worked with Yucatec Maya agriculturalists in Mexico with Dr. Karen Kramer. His ethnoarchaeological work includes experience with Navajo pastoralists, and several groups of Pueblo Indian agriculturalists of Arizona and New Mexico.

Dr. Greaves has additional training and interests in biological anthropology, human evolution, linguistics, ethnography, museum studies, and applied conservation anthropology. His current research includes hunting and gathering subsistence activities and technological use among the Pumé, research on land use and agricultural practices of modern Maya subsistence agriculturalists, and several geoarchaeological projects. He has been the Director of the Maxwell Museum's Office of Contract Archaeology since 2021.

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