Affluent hunters? Some comments in light of the Alyawara case

Our recent analysis (O'Connell and Hawkes in press) of plant food collecting among the Alyawara, a central Australian hunting group, shows that the cost of subsistence is sometimes quite high, far higher than the current conven. tional wisdom regarding hunters would suggest. We infer from available data that under traditional conditions, Alyawara women may have spent up to 70 hours per week collecting and processing enough food for themselves alone. If this inference is valid, it contradicts the widely held notions (1) that hunters seldom spend much time on the food quest, and (2) that they consistently underuse resources and labor. ' This contradition results not from special features of the Alyawara case, but from different methods of calculating the costs of subsistence. The approach we take not only provides a more realistic view of these costs, but facilitates the devel. opment of testable hypotheses concerning spatial and temporal variation in resource use.