Humphrys & Fundamental critiques

Humphry’s (1987) main critique of mobility models

• They are largely circular — projecting ecological logic onto fragmentary data and confirming what the environment already predicted

• The models say more about researchers' ecological logic than about prehistoric people.

Humphrey’s adaptive processes

• Long-term cumulative patterns

Humphrey’s adaptive behaviours

• What people actually did in specific situations

What do seasonal mobility models reconstruct

• Only adaptive processes

Environmental variability problem

• The environment is too variable for neat seasonal models to be meaningful.

• Kimberly’s drought frequency data shows that in a nominally 'summer rainfall' area, maximum precipitation varied by eight months across the record,

Use of San ethnography

• Contemporary San groups have been seen to live in semi permanent settlements and remain even when game migrated away

• Seasonal mobility was not universal and cannot be assumed.

Link between Humphrey’s and Wadley?

• Both recognise the limits of ecological determinism.

• Wadley argues aggregation is fundamentally social and ecology cannot reliably predict it

• Humphreys states not only can ecology not predict aggregation, but the archaeological record cannot recover actual mobility decisions at all.