Mobile Farmers

This is an ethnoarchaeological study of the settlements of the Raramuri (often known as the Tarahumara), focusing primarily on their mobility strategy. This is important because this groups presents a case where the common equation of agriculturalists = sedentary, and hunter-gatherers = mobile is broken. The Raramuri are agriculturalists with a pattern of mobility between two or more settlements during the course of any year. Graham provides not only a description of this unusual pattern of mobility by a farming group but also a number of insights and suggestions on how archaeologists can detect a mobile lifestyle in the residential areas of prehistoric agriculturalists.