Idaho National Laboratory Cultural Resource Management Plan

originate and where most processing, manufacturing, and maintenance activities take place…[and the
other is]…the location. A location is a place where extractive tasks are exclusively carried out [by the
foraging party]. (Binford 1980:5)
The more complex end of the continuum, called collecting by Binford, is defined as follows:
[Collectors] are characterized by the storage of food for at least part of the year supplying
themselves with specific resources through specially organized task groups. Site implications [are] that
special task groups may leave a residential [base] and establish a field camp from which foodprocurement
operations may be planned or executed. If such procurement activities are successful, the
obtained food (taken at locations) may be field processed [at the field camp] to facilitate transport and
then moved to the consumers in the residential base. (Binford 1980:10)
To summarize the difference between foragers and collectors, Binford concludes that foragers move
consumers to goods with frequent residential moves, while collectors move goods to consumers with
generally fewer residential moves. Cultures that move goods to people (collectors) are, in Binford’s
terms, more logistically organized.
The terms “foraging and collecting” refer only to hunter-gatherers that move their residences at least
once during the year. Entirely sedentary groups, such as agriculturalists, are even more logistically
organized since the group is committed to stay near their fields and storage facilities for much of the year.
Industrialized societies, such as our own, are the most logistically organized because most, if not all, of
our consumption involves nonlocal resources brought to us through elaborate logistical systems.
To account for the range of logistical organizations that occurred in the Desert West during
prehistoric and early historic times, Holmer (1980:133) defined harvesters as follows:
Harvesters are characterized by the storage of foods for at least part of the year and relatively large
semi-permanent to permanent residential bases tethered to a highly productive ecozone such as a marsh
and/or horticultural field. Resources not associated with the focal ecozone are acquired through specially
organized task groups that leave the residential base and establish a field camp from which
food-procurement operations are executed. The obtained food, taken at locations, may be processed at
the field camp and then transported to the residential base for storage and consumption. (Holmer 1980:
1331)
Since simple agriculturalists would often be similarly “tethered” to fields as harvesters are to
exceptionally productive ecozones, they should also fall under this category.
These three idealized subsistence strategies form a continuum from simple to complex. They are:
Simple 1) Foragers—frequent residential moves among resource patches
2) Collectors—occasional residential moves with frequent task group visits to
distant resource patches
Complex 3) Harvesters—permanent residential habitation near highly productive ecozones
with occasional task group visits to distant resource patches.
By constructing this continuum, it is not suggested that a particular culture can be placed at a single
point along it. There is clearly a considerable amount of variability within each group. For example, a
group may spend much of the year harvesting a single resource but spend the remaining time collecting a
variety of resources in a variety of ecozones; or, within a single cultural group, one residential group may
be more mobile (foraging) than their relatives (collecting). What is suggested is that, on average, there is
an interpretable difference between cultural groups with different logistical organizations. As implied by
the definitions of the idealized organizations, we would expect different relative frequencies of the
various kinds of sites for each organization. A test to determine if this is reflected in the archaeological
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