16. band

Back to *History 8 Neolithic Revolution Vocabulary

Bands are societies who “live as hunter-gatherers, collecting plants, and taking animals from their environment.” They “have no formal leadership and all the people have input in making group decisions.” They are egalitarian societies. (Manual, page 58)

“Social groups are necessarily small, because only a limited number of people can congregate together without quickly exhausting the food resources of a locality; such groups typically comprise either extended family units or a number of related families collected together in a band. An individual band is generally small in number, typically with no more than 30 individuals if moving on foot, or perhaps 100 in a group with horses or other means of transport. However, each band is known across a wide area because all residents of a given region are typically tied to one another through a large network of kinship and reciprocity; often these larger groups will congregate for a short period each year.”

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/277071/hunting-and-gathering-culture

Band societies have about 20 to 100 people in their groups. Band societies are “composed of smaller constituent units, usually in the form of nuclear families or extended families related to one another by kinship and marriage ties.” “It is often associated with a fixed territory over which it may proclaim exclusive hunting and gathering rights but exercises substantial flexibility in extending membership rights and allowing other groups to use its resources. “

http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/courses/239/band.html

Michael Urdahl