Th us, at Rome’s Circus Maximus, for example, a gladiato-
rial contest would be scheduled for the aft ernoon; the hunt, or
venatio, would serve as a warm-up act in the morning, though
sometimes the venatio went on for a period of days. Wild ani-
mals, such as lions and tigers that had been captured and kept
in cages below the arena, were raised by ropes and pulleys and
then released in the arena, where trained hunters called vena-
tors stalked and killed them, oft en as the animals were be-
ing goaded by assistants. Th e spectators were protected from
these animals by large nets or polished metal rollers attached
to the tops of the surrounding walls that separated spectators
from the killing ground. Archers were positioned on balco-
nies around the arena as a last line of defense.
Th ese trained hunters held a position high in the public’s
esteem, just below that of gladiators. Sometimes expert hunt-
ers from Africa and other regions were imported; in 79 b.c.e.
the Roman statesman Pompey organized games in which
skilled desert nomads were brought in to kill 20 elephants.
On other occasions slaves and prisoners of war with no train-
ing were forced into the arena in the expectation that they
themselves would become the hunted, and their gruesome
deaths would entertain the crowd. Th ese people, called besti-
arii, were frequently unwilling to face the wild animals in the
arena. In one case, a slave managed to get his head through
the spokes of a wheel in the cart carrying him and thus break
his neck before the hunt began; in another, the writer Seneca
tells the story of a German who killed himself in the lavatory
rather than face the ferocious beasts in the arena.
THE AMERICAS
BY MICHAEL J. O’NEAL
Th e usual stereotype of early hunter-gatherer cultures sug-
gests that they were primitive and unsophisticated, perhaps
almost subhuman. Th ey lived short lives that consisted of
nothing but hardship as they engaged in a desperate, ongo-
ing search for food. Th ey had no property, no art, no govern-
ment, no social organization—in short, none of the fruits of
civilization that accompanied the advent of agriculture and
the settled communities that agriculture produced. In the fa-
mous words of the 17th-century English philosopher Th omas
Hobbes, their lives were “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Th is stereotype, like many stereotypes, had a grain of
truth to it among ancient Americans. It is true that people
tended to live in smaller bands of perhaps 50 to 100 people,
with 20 to 30 being the optimal size; larger communities
strained the carrying capacity of the band’s territory, oft en
leading to confl ict and fi ssures in the band, as some members
broke away to form new bands. It is also true that population
densities were small, on the order of just one person per 30 to
50 square miles in resource-poor environments, perhaps as
many as 10 to 30 people per square mile in more resource-rich
environments, such as the Pacifi c Northwest. Early hunter-
gatherers (including those who subsisted by fi shing, a form
of hunting) were oft en on the move, so they had few posses-
sions. Archaeological evidence such as that uncovered in the
southeastern United States suggests that they also formed
more permanent communities, with public buildings and
burial grounds. Th ese more permanent communities estab-
lished a type of base camp to which groups returned at vari-
ous points during the year. Otherwise, the band moved about
according to changes in the seasons, exploiting resources as
they became available.
Th e social organization of early foragers tended to be
egalitarian, with everyone sharing in the fruits of the commu-
nity’s labor. Th e only specialization tended to be along gender
lines, with men engaged in hunting and women engaged in
gathering vegetables, fruits, berries, nuts, and even protein-
rich insects. Both men and women gathered fi rewood, and
both found small game and such food items as mollusks in
marine settings. Artwork was a blend of craft and technol-
ogy, as even ancient hunter-gatherer societies produced deco-
rative clothing, masks, wood carvings, baskets, pottery, and
other artifacts out of the materials available to them. While
life expectancy was oft en low, primarily because of a high rate
of infant mortality and high death rates among women giv-
ing birth, archaeological remains also suggest that a surpris-
ing number of people lived to a relatively advanced age, cared
for by the larger community.
Th e earliest hunter-gatherers migrated to the Americas
from Siberia to Alaska via a land bridge across what is now
the Bering Sea. It is estimated that the sea level rose to cover
the land bridge in about 8000 b.c.e. It is likely that the very
fi rst Americans crossed the land bridge to hunt, and aft er
about 11,000 b.c.e. and perhaps much earlier, they hunted
mammoths, mastodons, bison, and other large game. Th e
chief archaeological evidence comes from the vicinity of Clo-
vis, New Mexico, which gave its name to the Clovis peoples,
bands of Paleo-Indian hunters who, many historians believe,
were the fi rst people to inhabit the Americas, arriving in the
New Mexico region around 9500 b.c.e. and moving on from
there to South America. So-called Clovis points, or stone
spear points that historians believe were mounted on wooden
haft s, have been discovered in this area. Th ese points are
unique in their design in that they snap off on impact, allow-
ing the hunter to reuse the haft if the animal escapes.
In addition to hunting and foraging for food, the Clo-
vis people exploited other natural resources, including stone
(especially fl int), bones, and ocher (for dye). Many historians
believe that the Clovis people were the fi rst Americans; how-
ever, many questions surround where they came from and
what happened to them. Some of the richest archaeological
Clovis fi nds have been in the southeastern United States, but
no archaeological evidence has been found in Alaska. Fur-
ther, while some disagreement exists about the cause of their
disappearance sometime aft er 8500 b.c.e., when the archae-
ological record ends, most archaeologists believe that over-
hunting of big game contributed to their extinction.
Early hunter-gatherers naturally gravitated to environ-
ments that were rich in resources, including wild game, for-hunting, fishing, and gathering: The Americas 581