Reading Spoor

Abstract

AbstractThe spoor of animals and humans alike contain rich information about an individual and about a momentary activity this individual performed. If the – arguably hard-wired – human ability to read spoor and tracks is sufficiently trained, a footprint allows to glean from it various physical, kinetic, medical, social and psychologic data about an individual, as has been observed among various populations across the globe. The Ju|’hoansi San from northern Namibia still today practice traditional hunting so that tracking is a skill that is required and trained on a daily base. For a good tracker, the information she or he gets from spoor is equally rich on animal and human footprints, and it is not necessary that the tracker has been exposed before to the individual whose spoor she/he reads. In order to allow an assessment of how tenable are the interpretations by contemporary hunter-gatherers of prehistoric human footprints, this chapter elucidates methodological aspects of tracking and situates this ability in an epistemological framework.