Trackers’ Consensual Talk: Precise Data for Archaeology

This paper is based on ethnographic research with Ju|’hoan San in Botswana starting in 1970 and on translation and transcription work with Ju|’hoan San trackers from Namibia who travelled to the Caves du Volp in the French Pyrenees in 2013 to do archaeological work. The Tracking in Caves project, headed by German archaeologists Andreas Pastoors and Tilman Lenssen-Erz, was investigating fossilized human footprints in the caves dating back to around 17,000 calBP. The paper discusses three main verbal formats that can provide useful information to the archaeology of tracking: (1) narrative in the form of folktales and other oral forms referring to animal behaviour, (2) talk in the form of accounts of actual hunts, and (3) consensual discussion in the form of deliberations among trackers as they seek to gain many types of information from tracks. The paper outlines how the trackers and the archaeologists, after an initial period of misunderstanding and miscommunication, mutually learned from each other and eventually bonded on the basis of the scientific method. It does so by drawing on evidence from narrative, talk, and consensual discussion. By investigating verbal data provided by People’s Science, the Tracking in Caves project shows us that skill in tracking, using the tools of egalitarian communication and based on extensive environmental knowledge, has been an enabling feature of the long human story.