Bonescapes . Engaging People and Land with Animal Bones among South American Tropical Foragers.

POLITIS, G.

Marking the Land Marking the Land. Hunter-Gatherer Creation of meaning in their Environment

Routledge

Lugar: New York; Año: 2016; p. 152 - 179

The patterned discard of faunal remains across a landscape provides significant insights into ideological, cosmological, and ritual behaviors of human groups, and can also provide an archaeological signature of bone discard that potentially allows for distinctions to be made between group behaviors. These resultant behaviors are termed ?bonescapes?, which are behavioral phenomenon superimposed onto larger cultural and natural landscapes. Here, two ethnographic groups, the Nukak and the Hoti, are comparatively examined as case studies in an evaluation of the behavioral circumstances under which each operationalizes idiosyncratic or regularized faunal discard, display, treatment, or avoidance, with particular attention paid to the treatment of individual species. The significance of the patterning of bonescapes to the perceptions and the meaning hunter-gatherers attribute to landscape is a further focus, particularly with regard to the fashion in which bonescapes act to mark landscape, both physically and cosmologically, and create ongoing relationships between animals, people, and landscapes.