Geographic Distribution of Hunters in Relation to Ecological, Economic, and Social Factors

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This award to the University of Utah will allow the investigator to do ethnographic and ecological research in the Ituri tropical forest of Zaire. The project will study pygmy hunter-gatherers to determine what cultural and ecological factors have promoted the establishment and perpetuation of two unique group-hunting strategies--bow and net hunting. The project will study the geographic distribution of the two types of hunters in relation to forest composition and the location and intensity of forest horticulture. The relative efficiency of bow and net hunting will be compared in various types of forest settings. The project will acquire field data which will be integrated with data from remote sensing (LANDSAT) sources, to accurately measure the ecological situation the hunters operate in. The focus will be to understand why net hunting has replaced bow hunting in some but not all pygmy groups, and to understand how each type of hunting fits into the environment. This research is important because hunting groups have a uniquely intensive knowledge of the forest environment. By studying the variation in their use of the various forest environments, with the precise and copious data available from remote sensing sources, the project will advance our knowledge of tropical hunting and of tropical forests. Increased knowledge of how the tropical forest functions will help us preserve it, in the long run.