MISSOULA – The 猎奇重口 and partner institutions in the United Kingdom and Sweden recently were awarded a $12 million grant to study the social and cultural evolution of pre-farming hunter-gatherer societies.
The provided the Synergy Grant to an international team of four principal investigators. Anna Prentiss, UM Regents Professor of Anthropology, will serve as the PI in 猎奇重口, and she will work with co-PIs at the University of Cambridge (UK), University of York (UK) and Lund University (Sweden).
“This grant is further confirmation that UM provides world-class faculty, staff and students who engage in globally significant research and education,” said Prentiss, who in 2022 became only the fourth 猎奇重口n ever elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
UM’s share of the six-year grant will be about $3.2 million. The grant is titled “FORAGER: Investigating Alternative Trajectories for Human Demographic Growth in Temperate Northern Holocene Societies.”
“FORAGER will offer unique opportunities to rewrite global demographic history by investigating the causes and consequences of population booms and busts before the advent of farming,” Prentiss said. “It will bring together a 37-person team of climate scientists, bio-archaeologists, cultural and evolutionary anthropologists, and descendant communities to investigate hunter-gatherer-fisher societies from temperate environments across Eurasia and North America.”
Despite living in similar environments, cross-cultural comparisons between hunter-gatherers from North America, East Asia and Northern Europe are rare. Prentiss said their work will shift away from the agenda that agriculture is the main driver for social and cultural evolution – an idea that has prevailed in Western thought for centuries.
Since 2003, Prentiss has studied a village site in British Columbia that is an ancestral home of the Xwísten, the Bridge River Indian Band. The Bridge River site was home to a hunter-gatherer society from about 1,800 to 150 years ago. These people lived in clustered pit houses – dwellings that were partially dug into the ground and covered. Some pit houses were occupied into the 19th century. She said the new funding will expand work at the site, which has always involved close collaboration with the Xwísten people.
“We are trying to answer some really big questions,” Prentiss said. “The new fieldwork will focus on the early establishment of the village and its patterns of growth and periodic contraction. It will provide data allowing us to compare it to similar hunter-gatherer villages in Japan, answering questions associated with how and why ring-shaped arrangements of houses were established and what it meant for community, cohesion, cooperation and leadership.”
She said the UM portion of the grant will fund two postdoctoral scholars and two Ph.D. students, as well as field and lab training opportunities for additional undergraduate and graduate students. Three seasons of new archaeological research are planned for the Bridge River site, also known as K’etxelknáz to the descendant community. The UM scholars and students will collaborate with colleagues from Europe, Canada, the U.S. and Japan.
“This will be the first-ever global study of the causes and consequences of demographic booms and busts amongst semi-sedentary fisher-forager people,” Prentiss said. “Thus, it will allow us to impact the long-standing assumption that agriculture was required to generate large permanent settlements that include complex social organization.”
She said UM’s Department of Anthropology will lead the Indigenous fieldwork portion of the research and play a major role in work packages focused on settlement change, social inequity and material cultural evolution.
In her long and distinguished career, Prentiss has never been part of such an international grant. The proposal was reviewed in three stages, including an in-person presentation and Q&A at the European Research Council headquarters in Brussels. The principal investigators learned they had earned the funding at the end of October.
“Our new fieldwork will include new mapping, test excavations and larger-scale excavations, followed by a major lab effort that will include 80 new radiocarbon dates,” Prentiss said. “We can’t wait to get started.”
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Contact: Anna Prentiss, UM Regents Professor of Anthropology, 406-243-2693, anna.prentiss@umontana.edu.