Hunting and Extinctions in Southwest Asia and North America: The Silent Testimony of Communal Game Traps

Hunting and Extinctions in Southwest Asia and North America explores communal game traps for harvesting ungulate herds in two continents, utilizing a comparative approach addressing settings, species, and the hunters' societies.

The kites of Southwest Asia have been known to archaeologists for almost one hundred years but with the advent of high-resolution satellite images, thousands of sites have been found. Using the rich data from the Southwest and Central Asia and North America, this book addresses some of the important questions that arise concerning the social, economic and environmental implications of ancient and recent use of large game traps. This book has four major parts. The first introduces the book and reviews the evolution of human hunting. The second part presents examples of desert kites from various areas of Southwest and Central Asia. Detailed case studies are included that use a variety of evidence such as aerial surveys, field surveys, excavations, eye witnesses accounts, and petroglyph depictions. Environmental and geographical settings of the isolated traps, the clusters of traps, and the long chains are explored to provide conceptual models regarding past herd behavior and their seasonal migrations. The third part presents examples of communal game traps in various regions in North America, addressing the same issues discussed in the second part. The fourth part provides a comparative study of game traps in North America with the kites of Southwest Asia, focusing on the settings, species, and social organization of the hunters.

With the research on communal game traps increasing rapidly, this book provides the first inclusive synthesis on the subject and is for archaeologists, anthropologists, zoologists, ecologists, and environmentalists who are interested in past interactions between humans and their environments, and the impact of past human communities on the landscape and on target game populations, as well as the consequences that are still relevant today.

Dani Nadel is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Archaeology, the Zinman Institute of Archaeology, School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures, University of Haifa, Mt. Carmel, Haifa, Israel. He has studied hunter-gatherers' and Neolithic sites in the Southern Levant. He has surveyed and excavated desert kites in Israel and Armenia, and was partner in the study of recent timber-built game traps in the Great Basin of North America.

Guy Bar-Oz is a Professor in the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures, University of Haifa. He is an expert on the cultural and biological heritage of ancient Southwest Asia. His main interests are in developing and applying novel methods to reconstruct the cultural and environmental landscape of past societies. In the last few years, his research has concentrated on human impact on ancient environments and the collapse and resilience of past societies in marginal environments.

Dan Malkinson is a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences, Shamir Research Institute, University of Haifa, Israel. He is a landscape ecologist and has studied human-wildlife interactions in urban, agricultural, and natural environments. Harnessing his studies of past and contemporary landscapes, he hopes to implement the gained knowledge to conserve the ecosystems and biodiversity of the future.

Leland Bement is a Senior Researcher Emeritus at the Oklahoma Archeological Survey, The University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA. He has studied North American Plains hunter-gatherer societies and the development of communal hunting technology in pedestrian societies. He has discovered and excavated complex, stratified, communal bison kill sites in the Southern Plains of Oklahoma and Texas.