Edwin Wilmsen’s Contributions to Ethnoarchaeology

Abstract

Although Ed Wilmsen has made crucial contributions to ethoarchaeology, he does not identify himself as an ethnoarchaeologist, and so his important work in this field is often overlooked. He is not mentioned, for example, in the monumental history of ethnoarchaeology by David and Kramer (2000). When I recorded an on-camera interview with him in 2015, he described himself as a four-field anthropologist. The traditional “four fields” of Anthropology in the USA and Canada are Cultural (or Social) Anthropology, Archaeology, Biological Anthropology and Linguistic Anthropology. In the mid1960s Ed Wilmsen and his fellow PhD students in the University of Arizona’s Anthropology Department were required to take rigorous qualifying examinations in all four of these fields. His work on hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari made good use of all of this training and ranged far beyond it into colonial archives, and into the translation and editing of the journals of nineteenth-century European travelers through the Kalahari. As he notes in this essay, when he traveled in 1973 to CaeCae (/Khae/Khae in other publications) for a six-month field season, he shared the then-widespread view that Kalahari hunter-gatherers were among the last living representatives of that evolutionary stage, and that ethnoarchaeological studies of them might be used to infer behavior and social structures of prehistoric hunter-gatherers far distant in time and space from the Kalahari. He anticipated that this would be his only trip to Africa and that he would thereafter be applying the insights gathered from this field season to interpretation of Paleoindian archaeology back in the USA. He never did return to Paleoindian archaeology and has spent the last forty-five years working in Botswana. Between 1973 and 1980 he spent more than three years in the field with Zhu foragers, employing all aspects of his training in four-field anthropology. He learned their language, he studied their subsistence strategies and kinship system, nutrition and fertility, he drew blood for nutritional, endocrine and mt-DNA studies, and he undertook archaeological excavations at CaeCae (Wilmsen 1978). Some of the leading linguists studying Khoisan languages are German, and Ed’s fluency in that language enabled him to delve more deeply into Khoisan historical linguistics than most other anthropologists working with Kalahari hunter-gatherers. All of these lines of inquiry were also being pursued by various members of Lee and DeVore’s research group, but Wilmsen was able to spend more time in the field during the 1970s than any one of them, thanks to three large grants from the US National Science Foundation. He was also commissioned by the government of Botswana, which had become an independent nation only in 1966, to write a lengthy summary of the current status of foraging peoples within its borders.