Hunting Goals and Meat Redistribution among Central African Bofi Foragers and the Archaeological Implications of Sharing

Since 1999, Lupo and colleagues have studied hunting and meat-sharing among Aka and Bofi forest foragers in the Central African Republic. They employ ethnoarchaeological methods to test models of sharing and cooperation derived from behavioral ecology. They are now examining the links between technological choices in hunting, patterns of meat-sharing, and parental effort. Observational and interview data from two forager/farmer villages identify important differences in the time-scale of decision-making and parental effort in response to local circumstances in prey availability and access to human resources. The results challenge current ideas about how resource depression influences changes in human resource choice and technology. This project has generated abundant physical samples, and their analysis may help show how, why and when some cooperative behaviors emerged in human prehistory, and how changes in habitat and prey abundance influence human choice. Their results on the time-scale and nature of decision-making bear on important contemporary issues such as (1) overexploitation of game, (2) effects of the burgeoning bush-meat trade, and (3) rainforest depletion due to rural development, especially logging. These issues are of special interest to ECOFAC (Ecosystèmes Forestiers d'Afrique Central), the EU entity managing the Ngotto Reserve. ECOFAC is helping in this work, and is using these results to augment their research on the bush-meat trade and identification of traditional tribal hunting areas. (See Hewlett's project description in Area 1 for more information on logistics and infrastructure for IPEM projects Central African Republic.)