Fittingly, publication of this edited volume on hunter-gatherers’ built environments very nearly coincides with the centennial of Carl O. Sauer's influential essay, “The Morphology of Landscape” (University of California Publications in Geography 2[2]19–53, 1925), which articulated his rejection of environmental determinism and laid the foundation for a new “cultural geography.” The coincidence is apt because this book challenges us to look beyond the functional utility of hunter-gatherers’ houses and to see them as spaces transformed and imbued with meaning by culture-wielding humans: this refocusing aligns perfectly with Sauer's promotion of “cultural landscapes” as a conceptual framework for studying human-environment interactions. Many chapters also express a Sauerian frustration with the continued tendency—now more than a hundred years later—to treat hunter-gatherers as a (monolithic) class of people in perpetual motion, traversing natural landscapes in pursuit of essential resources, rather than as an extraordinarily diverse (subsistence) category whose member groups not only created cultural landscapes but, in so doing, also left an ecological legacy for subsequent generations (sensu John Odling-Smee and Kevin N. Laland, “Ecological Inheritance and Cultural Inheritance: What Are They and How Do They Differ?” Biological Theory 6[3]:220–230, 2011). Even the book's title is defiant: More than Shelter from the Storm deliberately pushes back against narrow and deterministic stereotypes of hunter-gatherer construction, highlighting the diversity of both hunter-gatherer houses and their interpretation, and providing exemplary alternatives to traditional ways of detecting and understanding built shelters. The result is both informative and provocative; the collection has much to offer readers interested in hunter-gatherers, landscape modification, and human ecology in the broadest sense.
The book includes a brief introduction by editors Brian N. Andrews and Danielle A. Macdonald, nine case studies presented by a mix of established researchers and fresh voices, and an incisive epilogue by decorated veteran Margaret W. Conkey, who has repeatedly demonstrated the importance of challenging the status quo. The “data chapters” span the late Pleistocene and Holocene (including one modern ethnoarchaeological study, Chapter 10 by Matthew J. O'Brien et al.), and they cover a fair bit of the globe, including Eurasia (France, Jordan, Norway, Mongolia, and Russia), North America (California, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming, Labrador, and the North American Arctic), and South America (Argentina). Topical diversity is broader still, and even where common themes emerge, the authors’ respective approaches are distinct, so the book manages to avoid the redundancy that sometimes creeps into thematic sets of papers. For example, several chapters center on defining the physical contours of hunter-gatherer residential life. Chapter 2 by Amy E. Clark and Sarah Ranlett examines within-house spatial patterning and identifies “rules of organization” across a landscape to diagnose the origins of “placemaking” among humans, whereas in Chapter 6 by Christopher Morgan and Gustavo Neme, the focus is not on the structures but rather on the midden deposits in and around them, which are used to distinguish long-term residential bases from exploratory or short-term camps. Another pair of chapters consider the concept of spatial attractors, but in one (Chapter 5 by Bryan C. Hood et al.), the built structures themselves anchor groups to specific places, sometimes for generations, and in the other, hearth features within structures attract individuals and create hotspots of activity (Chapter 10). Likewise, the several chapters that take a diachronic approach nonetheless present the reader with a range of analytical scales and interpretive frameworks, from a comparison of house forms across thousands of kilometers and hundreds of years to explore social cohesion and collective memory (Lauren E. Y. Norman and Kelly A. Eldridge in Chapter 8) to the reconstruction of individual brush huts’ intimately detailed life histories to track the dynamic interplay between domestic and symbolic activities (Macdonald and Lisa A. Maher in Chapter 4). Brooke M. Morgan and Andrews in Chapter 7 take a similarly close approach, but in this instance, it is to explore the gendered use of space and physical manifestations of “community” at a camp site around 10,000 years old.
Among the most stimulating chapters are those that ask—and provide compelling answers to—fundamental questions. “Why build [shelters] when there are caves?” (p. 40; Kathleen Sterling et al., Chapter 3). Should long-term residential bases at altitude look different from ones at lower elevations (Chapter 6, p. 132)? And is house size a reliable proxy for social complexity (Christopher B. Wolff, Chapter 9)? As these chapters show, disrupting stereotypes about hunter-gatherer construction (or anything else) sometimes requires that we go back to first principles.
In sum, More than Shelter presents a wide range of thought-provoking and data-rich case studies. Researchers looking to expand their approach to the identification and interpretation of built environments will find inspiration here. The language and concepts are generally accessible, and in addition to being an important reference for those interested in human foragers, the book would be a fine addition to university curricula exploring agency, place-making, cultural geography, and niche construction, as well as ones centered on more traditional archaeological topics.
Nonetheless, any research or teaching involving More than Shelter should be augmented with case studies from equatorial regions and the Southern Hemisphere, which are virtually absent from this volume; this is an unfortunate omission, particularly given how important some areas of Africa, Australia, and South America have been to the development of hunter-gather theory more generally. And although the book's (mostly) chronological organization keeps with a long archaeological tradition, no interpretive value emerges from this structure, and it could be seen as a latent reification of the very progressive notions the book means to counteract.
Still, these relatively minor shortcomings could be leveraged as springboards for discussion in the classroom; ultimately, they do not detract greatly from the book's contributions to our understanding of hunter-gatherers’ relationships with and modifications of their environments and to breaking down stereotypes about hunter-gatherer architecture and terraforming.
