Robert K. Hitchcock

• PhD
• Professor at University of New Mexico

Indigenous people around the world who have been affected by conservation-related resettlement have employed a number of strategies to cope with policies that seek to resettle them.These include moving gurther into remote places in order to avoid being resettled. Strategies also include seeking to negotiate with agencies attempting to establish pro...

Biodiversity conservation has been a concern of states and governments for centuries. One way in which governments have sought to protect biodiversity is to set aside areas of land as protected areas aimed at conserving species and the ecosystems in which they are found. Some of these protected areas were places where indigenous (sometimes referred...

The issue of ethics arises frequently in the discussions of conservation-related resettlement as it affects indigenous peoples world-wide. Ethics are the moral codes and principles by which societies are supposed to live. Ethics can also be seen as the rules which organizations and individuals are supposed to follow. Ethical principles are laid out...

The continent of Africa has witnessed some of the more egregious examples of involuntary removals of people from protected areas. Drawing on cases of national parks and protected areas in southern Africa which have witnessed cases of coercive conservation—situations where groups and individuals were required to leave their ancestral territories inv...

The impacts of conservated-forced resettlement (CFR) have been presented in theoretical models by anthropologists and socioogists, including Thayer Scudder and Elizabeth Colson, and Michael Cernea. These two sets of models indicate that the initial effects of resettlement on societies are largely negative. Over time, as resettled people begin to re...

The United States was the first country in the world to establish a national park, Yellowstone National Park, in 1872. Some 26 indigenous groups were eventually removed from Yellowstone, some at the hands of military personnel and park rangers. Removals of indigenous peoples also occurred in Glacier National Park and Yosemite National Park along wi...

There is significant diversity among African hunter-gatherers in the roles of shamans, healers, and people who connect to supernatural gamekeepers. In some cases, these individuals engage in rituals and activities that are believed to have direct or indirect impact on hunting outcomes or on the environment (such as causing rain). Drawing on data fr...

This chapter assesses the transition from hunting and gathering to food production, drawing on data from the Ju/’hoansi San of southern Africa. After considering some of the explanations that have been provided for the origins of agriculture, the transformations that occurred in the foraging populations residing in the northern Kalahari region of N...

Far from being open borders, including under globalisation, the borders of Zimbabwe have become increasingly defined over time. This is true in the case of the Botswana-Zimbabwe border of western and north-western Zimbabwe, which has seen a transformation from a relatively porous frontier zone in the late nineteenth century to one that is now seein...

Research codes and contracts have been developed to protect Indigenous and marginalized peoples from exploitation and to promote inclusion, so that research will become more beneficial to them. We highlight three important but often overlooked challenges for such instruments, drawing on examples from the San of southern Africa.

Hunting has been crucial in early human evolution. Some San (Bushmen) of southern Africa still practice their indigenous hunting. The use of poisons is one remarkable aspect of their bow-and-arrow hunting but the sources, taxonomic identifications of species used, and recipes, are not well documented. This study reports on fieldwork to investigate...

This book is about transitional periods of cultural and environmental change as seen through the lenses of archaeology and ethnography. Incorporating data from across six continents and tracing the human experience from the Late Pleistocene to the present, this book offers a global comparative perspective on transitional states. Questions of causal...

The Estuarine Ecological Knowledge Network (EEKN) brings together scientists and coastal fishing communities in seeking new ways forward for Earth's major river deltas and estuaries, including the Mississippi (United States), Rio Grande (United States), Danube (Romania/Ukraine), Ganges (India/Bangladesh), Niger (Nigeria), and Mekong (Vietnam) river...

Tshwa San live primarily in western Zimbabwe in Tsholotsho District of Matabeleland North and Bulilimamangwe District in Matabeleland South and are one of two groups in Zimbabwe who self-identify as indigenous people. Recent surveys indicate that the population size of Tshwa is approximately 2,800. The vast majority of Tshwa today are subsistence f...

This article addresses the major problems created for people and communities who are displaced by the construction of large dams. We focus specifically on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, (LHWP), one of the largest hydroelectric and water transfer projects of its kind in Africa. The LHWP was implemented in 1986, when a treaty was signed between...

A hunter-gatherer or foraging society is a group of people whose livelihood is based on the hunting, trapping (or fishing) of animals and gathering wild plants. Whether or not foragers impact their environment depends on several factors, some of which derive from foragers themselves and others which are external to their society. These factors incl...

This paper addresses the issues of community governance, leadership, and San traditional authorities in Namibia. We examine the roles of the traditional authorities of the two San majority conservancies in Namibia, Nyae Nyae and N≠a Jaqna. Both of these conservancies, the largest in Namibia, have been the scene of repeated conflicts over land, graz...

Estuaries are profoundly rich, diverse, and complex ecosystems, and crucial to the overall health of Earth's oceans. Estuarine ecological complexity is matched by tremendous human cultural diversity. In the United States, millions of people live in estuarine environments from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic—many of whom directly depend on the prod...

Many governments and conservation organisations have argued that hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists are responsible, in considerable part, for environmental degradation and biodiversity losses in southern Africa. Particular attention has been paid to alleged wildlife losses, especially elephants in Botswana. This article considers some of t...

Over the past two millennia, dietary transitions among foragers in southern Africa have impacted their height, family size, disease rates, and nutrition. The shift to a sedentary life has brought with it a range of health and social issues. Yet, foraging remains important for food security and has unique cultural value

Over the past two millennia, dietary transitions among foragers in southern Africa have impacted their height, family size, disease rates, and nutrition. The shift to a sedentary life has brought with it a range of health and social issues. Yet, foraging remains important for food security and has unique cultural value.

Many governments and conservation organisations have argued that hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists are responsible, in considerable part, for environmental degradation and biodiversity losses in southern Africa. Particular attention has been paid to alleged wildlife losses, especially elephants in Botswana. This article considers some of t...

This book was funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme (7FP), TropicMicroArch 623293 Project (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/187754_en.html). The book will be Open Access, thanks to FP7 post-grant Open Access (https://www.openaire.eu/postgrantoapilot).

The San (Bushmen, Basarwa) of the Kalahari Desert and adjacent regions in Southern Africa have been studied intensively by anthropologists for over a century. For the past 40 years human rights and development work has been carried out in cooperation with San communities in the Republic of Botswana. Using a comparative perspective, we examine the e...

There has been a long-standing debate about the roles of San in the militaries of southern Africa and the prevalence of violence among the Ju/'hoansi and other San people. The evolutionary anthropology and social anthropological debates over the contexts in which violence and warfare occurs among hunters and gatherers are considered, as is the “tri...

This is the editorial to the part-special issue in the Journal of Southern African Studies.

This article reviews four books on hunters and gatherers. It begins with a discussion of the debates over the concept of hunter-gatherers. Theoretical approaches to hunter-gather studies are examined briefly. The view then assesses the four books and the various subjects which they address. These subjects include the issue of ethnographic analogy,...

This paper considers a specific kind of hunting strategy, ambush hunting, employed by Ju/’hoansi San who reside in northwestern Botswana and northeastern Namibia. We examine this hunting technique from ethnoarchaeological, archaeological, historical, and ethnographic perspectives. Data are drawn from an analysis of 14 blinds at ǂGi Pan on the Botsw...

As former mobile foraging peoples, the indigenous Hai//om San of Namibia lost most of their land – including Etosha National Park and Mangetti West – to other groups and the state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After independence (1990), the government redistributed some of this land to various expropriated groups. In the following over...

Reviews the plant and beetle poisons used by the San (Bushmen) hunter-gatherers

One of the enduring historical mysteries of the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa is that of the disappearance of two Royal Air Force cadets during the Second World War. Eight Tshwa San (Bushmen) were arrested and tried for the murder of the flyers. The trial took place in the High Court of the Bechuanaland Protectorate (BP) in September to Octobe...

This volume assembles in one place the work of scholars who are making key contributions to a new approach to the United Nations, and to global organizations and international law more generally. Anthropology has in recent years taken on global organizations as a legitimate source of its subject matter. The research that is being done in this field...

While there is evidence of discontinuities in the sequences of some archaeological sites that exhibit long-term occupation and use over time in southern Africa, there is less evidence of such discontinuity in the ethnographic record. Drawing on long-term interdisciplinary studies of southern African peoples in the Kalahari Desert, this paper examin...

In the 1980s, Lewis Binford (1931-2011) started an analysis of hunter-gatherer site structure. This analysis was later put on hold in order to organize ethnographic and environmental data to use as frames of reference for the analysis. Although the frames of reference were constructed by 2001, Binford never completed his analysis of site structure....

The use of archery to hunt appears relatively late in human history. It is poorly understood but the application of poisons to arrows to increase lethality must have occurred shortly after developing bow hunting methods; these early multi-stage transitions represent cognitive shifts in human evolution. This paper is a synthesis of widely-scattered...

Between 1989 and 2007 the World Bank was one of the funders of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project in southern Africa. This project, which included two large dams (Katse and Mohale), had significant impacts on local people, including loss of grazing, arable land, and resettlement of 71 households in Phase 1A and 325 households in Phase 1B, with a t...

The Hai‖om are the largest and most widely dispersed San population in Namibia. Like many other San peoples in Southern Africa, the Hai‖om were dispossessed, marginalised, and discriminated against by other groups and by the colonial state. In 1949, the South West African administration appointed a Commission for the Preservation of the Bushmen, ch...

Violent and non-violent conflicts and interactions between hunter-gatherers and settlers took place in a number of areas in eastern and southern Africa during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Foragers had to cope with the incursions of settlers in their territories, which resulted in significant competition over land and natural resourc...

Kalahari and Transvaal Tswana practised a mixed economy of herding, agriculture, and hunting for meat (and for skins). While faunal remains reflect higher percentage of domestic stock than of wild animals, such proportions alone do not reflect hunting's importance. Hunters probably slaughtered animals in the veld and dried the meat in strips for tr...

This article considers the complex cases of indigenous peoples in three Commonwealth countries in southern Africa: Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. In terms of national-level policy, the governments of these countries do not differentiate indigenous peoples from the rest of their populations. They do, however, have programmes aimed at assisting...

They are laborers, soldiers, refugees, and orphans. In areas of the world torn by poverty, disease, and war, millions of children are invisible victims, deprived of home, family, and basic human rights. Their chances for a stable adult life are extremely slim. The powerful interdisciplinary volume Vulnerable Children brings a global child-rights pe...

In this chapter, the issue of children’s rights in Central and Southern Africa, with particular reference to indigenous peoples, specifically the Batwa of Central Africa and the San of Southern Africa. These populations historically suffered massive human rights violations. Their civil and political rights and social, economic, and cultural rights...

This article assesses the substantive and varied contributions of Richard B. Lee of the University of Toronto to hunter-gatherer studies, anthropology, ethnoarchaeology, the study of Ju/'hoansi and San peoples, and indigenous peoples' studies. Over a period of nearly 5 decades, Lee has made a number of important theoretical contributions, including...

This paper presents new information on the antiquity of the bow and arrow in the Kalahari. Excavations at White Paintings Shelter (WPS) uncovered bone point fragments that appear to have been parts of reversible arrowheads that could have been used with poison. We present a sequence of nine new, internally consistent OSL ages that date specific soi...

Southern Africa is facing tremendous challenges when it comes to water. In 2009, half of the 15 states of the Southern African Development Community were considered to be facing serious water-related constraints, and some have been classified as water-scarce.

This article will address the relationships among development, nutritional well-being, and HIV/AIDS in a remote area of southern Africa: the northwestern Kalahari Desert region of the Republic of Botswana and the adjacent Nyae Nyae region of northeastern Namibia. According to the United Nations AIDS Program (UNAIDS) and other organizations, Botswan...

The San of Botswana have had to cope with government policies, including ones aimed at assimilation and sedentarisation which had significant impacts on their subsistence and social security. In response, San and non-government organisations working with them attempted to draw on the international discourse on indigenous peoples' rights in their ef...

The Ju/’hoan San, or Ju/’hoansi, of Namibia and Botswana are perhaps the most fully described indigenous people in all of anthropology. This is the story of how this group of former hunter-gatherers, speaking an exotic click language, formed a grassroots movement that led them to become a dynamic part of the new nation that grew from the ashes of a...

The Republic of Botswana in southern Africa has long been regarded as an exceptional African nation-state. Not only has it been democratic for over forty years, with half a dozen open, corruption-free elections, but it has also maintained an active civil society, an independent press, political stability, economic growth, and, until recently, an ex...

The Lake Ngami Basin is important for understanding the LSA record during the Holocene in the Kalahari. We provide an OSL and radiocarbon dated sequence that relates changing lake levels to the stratigraphy and archaeology of Mogapelwa 1. At intervals during thelast 16 ka the site offered easy access to the resources of a flowing Nchabe River and a...

Over nearly two-and-a-half decades, indigenous peoples and their supporters expended enormous energy on developing a declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples that both protects and promotes their individual and collective rights. The debates surrounding the declaration focused on issues ranging from self-determination to the rights of indige...

Over nearly two-and-a-half decades, indigenous peoples and their supporters expended enormous energy on developing a declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples that both protects and promotes their individual and collective rights. The debates surrounding the declaration focused on issues ranging from self-determination to the rights of indige...

Even as the struggle of the San for land rights and human rights in southern Africa is beginning to catch the attention of the international community, social ills such as economic dependency, alcoholism, malnutrition, and societal breakdown continue to threaten their survival. Many of these problems were instigated or made worse by policies create...

Social science analysis of hunter-gatherer societies has highlighted their economic and cultural subordination to neighbouring peoples. This article shows that, at least in the case of the San in Botswana, state bureaucratic domination is becoming the determining factor in social change. The authors provide evidence of bureaucratic domination with...

Indigenous peoples have been characterized as ‘victims of progress’,1 ‘invisible indigenes’,2 ‘resource rebels’,3 and ‘First Nations who are organizing to survive’.4 Most, if not all peoples, who consider themselves to be indigenous or aboriginal have histories that include complex kinds of contacts with other peoples, some of which were negative....

The severe drought of 1973–1975 in Somalia had major impacts on pastoral populations, many of whom moved into specially established camps where food, water and medical assistance were provided by the government and international agencies. At the end of the drought it was decided to settle the remaining 120,000 people in six settlements, three of wh...

On December 13 th , 2006, the San and Bakgalagadi of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve won an important legal victory in the High Court of Botswana after a long and expensive legal case. The decisions of the three High Court judges guaranteed that people who had been removed from their ancestral territories in the Central Kalahari would be allowed...

Drought is a normal part of Nebraska’s climate. It is also the leading cause of monetary disaster loss in the United States. FEMA (1995) has estimated that U.S. drought losses average $6-8 billion dollars per year. A majority of these losses are incurred in the agricultural sector. Nebraska’s losses alone topped $1.2 billion in 2002 (AP 2003). To e...