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and Hadza, who lived in a world of African game like many of our earliest ancestors. We do not look at the twenty-first-century descendants of those ethnic groups; we look, instead, at the way they lived when anthropologists first contacted them. The less altered by contact with Western civilization any foraging group was when first described, the more useful that group’s description is to our reconstruction of ancient life.
    Some of the first Westerners to visit clanless foragers considered them Stone Age people frozen in time. This idea was so naïve and demeaning that it triggered a backlash. Soon revisionists were claiming that recent foragers can tell us nothing about the past, because they are merely the victims of expanding civilization. That revisionism went too far, and now the pendulum is swinging back to a more balanced position.
    Some of the most eloquent spokespersons for the balanced position are anthropologists who have spent years among foragers. The late Ernest S. (“Tiger”) Burch Jr., who devoted a lifetime to Arctic hunters, conceded that the industrialized nations’ tendency to swallow up ethnic minorities has left few foraging societies unaltered. This situation does not mean, however, that we cannot make use of recent foragers to understand their prehistoric counterparts. What we need to do, according to Burch, is to select a distinct form of society—clanless foragers would be one example—and create a model of that society that can be compared to both ancient and modern groups. If we do our work well, some aspects of our model should apply to all clanless foragers, regardless of when they lived. In other words, if one finds that the foragers of 10,000 years ago were doing something that their counterparts were still doing in the year 1900, that behavior can hardly have resulted from the impact of Western civilization.
    One of the most important behaviors we look at in this chapter is the creation of widespread networks of cooperating neighbors. We also examine the archaeological record for comparable networks in the distant past.
    SURVIVING THE ICE
    Archaeologists have often compared the Gravettians and Magdalenians of Ice Age Europe to the recent Eskimo (or Inuit, as they call themselves). The Ice Age preservation of meat by freezing, the shelters built of animal bone, the knives resembling the Eskimo woman’s ulu, the animal-oil lamps, the ivory carvings, and the heavy dependence on reindeer all invite comparisons to living Arctic peoples. To be sure, the Ice Age in Europe ended 10,000 years ago. But as recently as 1920 there were still indigenous foragers at the top of the world, largely unaffected by the industrialized West, who earned their living under conditions reminiscent of the Ice Age.
    The Eskimo were not the first people to enter Arctic America. The archaeological record shows that some of the earliest occupants of that region were boreal forest hunters whose behavior resembled that of the later Athapaskan people of Canada. Some 4,000 years ago, however, an archaeological complex called the “Arctic Small Tool Tradition” foreshadowed later Eskimo culture. The people using these small tools kept warm in semi-subterranean houses with tunnel entrances, essentially a sod-covered version of the later igloo.
    About 2,500 years ago, from the Mackenzie River on the west to Hudson Bay on the east, a new and more convincingly proto-Eskimo culture spread over the Canadian Arctic. Called the “Dorset Culture,” it was created by hunters who lit oil-burning lamps on Arctic nights, used snow-cutting knives to build igloos, made bone shoes for sled runners, used antler or walrus-ivory spikes to walk on ice, and left behind models of what were probably kayaks.
    Thousands of years would pass, however, before the full richness of Eskimo culture was revealed to the West. The great pioneer of Eskimo anthropology was the intrepid Knud Rasmussen. Raised in a Danish settlement in Greenland,