The University of Montana, along with institutions in the United Kingdom and Sweden, has secured a $12 million grant from the European Research Council to study the social and cultural evolution of pre-farming hunter-gatherer societies. The international team includes four principal investigators: Anna Prentiss from UM, Enrico Crema from the University of Cambridge, Oliver Craig from the University of York, and Peter Jordan from Lund University.
Anna Prentiss, Regents Professor of Anthropology at UM, will lead the Montana portion of the project. She stated, “This grant is further confirmation that UM provides world-class faculty, staff and students who engage in globally significant research and education.” Prentiss was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.
UM will receive about $3.2 million over six years as part of this grant for a project titled “FORAGER: Investigating Alternative Trajectories for Human Demographic Growth in Temperate Northern Holocene Societies.” According to Prentiss, “FORAGER will offer unique opportunities to rewrite global demographic history by investigating the causes and consequences of population booms and busts before the advent of farming. It will bring together a 37-person team of climate scientists, bio-archaeologists, cultural and evolutionary anthropologists, and descendant communities to investigate hunter-gatherer-fisher societies from temperate environments across Eurasia and North America.”
The project aims to compare hunter-gatherer societies across North America, East Asia, and Northern Europe—an approach that is uncommon despite similarities in their environments. The researchers plan to move away from traditional views that agriculture was necessary for social and cultural evolution.
Prentiss has worked since 2003 at a village site in British Columbia that was home to an ancestral hunter-gatherer society known as Xwísten or Bridge River Indian Band. This site dates back roughly 1,800 years and features pit houses occupied into the 19th century. The new funding will allow expanded research at this location in partnership with local Indigenous communities.
“We are trying to answer some really big questions,” said Prentiss. “The new fieldwork will focus on the early establishment of the village and its patterns of growth and periodic contraction. It will provide data allowing us to compare it to similar hunter-gatherer villages in Japan, answering questions associated with how and why ring-shaped arrangements of houses were established and what it meant for community, cohesion, cooperation and leadership.”
Funding will support two postdoctoral scholars, two Ph.D. students, as well as training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at UM. Three new archaeological field seasons are planned at Bridge River (K’etxelknáz), involving collaboration with colleagues from Europe, Canada, the U.S., and Japan.
“This will be the first-ever global study of the causes and consequences of demographic booms and busts amongst semi-sedentary fisher-forager people,” Prentiss said. “Thus, it will allow us to impact the long-standing assumption that agriculture was required to generate large permanent settlements that include complex social organization.”
UM’s Department of Anthropology is set to lead Indigenous fieldwork components while also contributing significantly to studies on settlement change, social inequality, and material culture.
Prentiss noted this is her first time participating in such an international grant competition; after multiple review stages including an interview at ERC headquarters in Brussels, she learned her team had received funding at October’s end.
“Our new fieldwork will include new mapping, test excavations and larger-scale excavations, followed by a major lab effort that will include 80 new radiocarbon dates,” she said. “We can’t wait to get started.”
