On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:15, michael raiti wrote:

>Does anyone have any references for studies on
>hunter-gatherer societies which include a description
>of their eating habits?
>
>Mike

There will be plenty of individual ethnographies people will recommend, but you really need Lewis 
Binford's "Contructing Frames of Reference". He tabulates 390 hunter-gatherer groups along 15 
variables including:

Group name

Group population

Population density

Percentage of a group's food dependence on gathering plants

Percentage of each group's dependence on hunting animals

Percentage of each group's dependence on fishing

What food type supplies the majority of each group's nutritional intake

The other variables rate group size, mobility (settled, nomadic etc.), village size, temporary 
encampment size, average number of residential moves made by household units annually, total 
distance of these residential moves, vegetation type (boreal forest, tropical savannah woodland 
etc.) and soil type.

This is all in a single chart. The rest of the book is a goldmine of other information on these 390 
groups. 

On Amazon they have their "Look inside!" function operating, but this may disappoint you. The 
book is about model-building in archaeology and anthropology and the contents and index reflect 
that. What you don't see is that that the book demonstrates how raw data can be used to build 
models. And Binford provides masses of data.

Highly recommended if you prefer data to uninformed speculation from the armchair.

Keith