Human Behavioral Ecology (Other Keyword)
76-100 (120 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gulf of Maine Archaic Tradition has been defined as a persistent technological pattern that spans the Early to Middle Archaic Periods ca. 9,500-6,000 B.P. in the northeast, although sites containing this component have remained poorly documented. It is possible that human population density in New England was low throughout...
A Multiproxy Analysis of Fire, Vegetation, Climatic, and Anthropogenic Activity during the Mid- to Late Holocene in the West Desert of Utah, United States (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pollen from cave sediments within Hogup Cave and pollen and macroscopic charcoal found in a nearby 268 cm sediment core were analyzed and used as proxies to reconstruct the paleoecological and anthropogenic record of Hogup Cave and the surrounding region, found in the West Desert of Utah. The relationship between Paleoindians and their use of the...
Obsidian Trade vs. Direct Acquisition: A View from Central California (2018)
Geochemical sourcing of lithic artifacts has proven to be a useful analytical tool for the studies of trade and mobility in the archaeological record. However, it is difficult to distinguish lithic material acquired through exchange from material acquired directly from the source. Economic models of lithic reduction suggest that material procured for the purpose of exchange may be treated differently than material procured for personal consumption. I compare obsidian source profiles and lithic...
On the way to the islands: the role of early domestic plants in the initial peopling of the Antilles (2016)
Indigenous people initiated their dispersal toward the Caribbean isles at sometime around 8000 to 7800 years before present. This time framework coincides with the consolidation/aggregation and eventual transference of new dietary suites (domestic plants) to long distances, having been this process one that initiated at least in two different and mutually distant regions of continental America. This presentation explores the feasibility of the ideal free distribution (IFD) and diet breadth (DB)...
Paleofecal Analysis from a Human Behavioral Ecology Perspective (2017)
Paleofecal research has benefited from many recent methodological advances, such as SEM and high-throughput DNA sequencing. However, as our results grow both more robust and more precise, our interpretations have not always followed suit. Researchers are eager to establish what was on the menu, but often more cautious in exploring the biocultural and evolutionary implications of those findings. Some scholars have argued that it is difficult to apply human behavioral ecology (HBE) models to...
Paleoindian Settlement of the Central Great Basin: Testing Environmental, Radiocarbon, and Lithic Proxies with Data from Grass Valley, Nevada (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Explaining Paleoindian settlement decisions in the Central Great Basin remains an important though controversial topic. Unfortunately, the limited archaeological and paleoenvironmental records from the region make progress on this issue challenging. To help address some of the problems of limited data in order to better...
Persistence in Turkey Husbandry Practices in the Southwest and Four Corners Region: The Isotopic and Ethnohistorical Evidence (2018)
Research has demonstrated an independent domestication event of Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) occurred in the Southwestern USA between 200 BC—AD 500, which was separate from the domestication of turkey within the Mesoamerican world. While aDNA analyses revealed this as a separate and distinct event, we still know little about how turkey husbandry was practiced in the prehistoric Southwest, USA, Northwest, Mexico, and Four Corners regions. Our research applies carbon and nitrogen isotopes to a...
Phytolithic Analysis of Site FxJj 20 AB (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Controlled fire could have significantly impacted hominin evolution, providing an adaptive release resulting in reduced teeth and gut size, and larger brains. Evidence of hominin controlled fire is sparse in the early Pleistocene archaeological record. These sites are usually in open-air contexts where taphonomic factors can obscure the identification of...
The Potential Integration of Niche Construction Theory into the Framework of Human Behavioral Ecology (2015)
Throughout the history of hominid evolution, our ancestors developed the ability to adapt to extremely different environments and eventually colonize the entire world. The capacity to adapt to environments as different as the Amazon Rainforest and the Arctic tundra is complex, and has led some anthropologists to question the utility of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary frameworks. The debate over the utility of these frameworks has become more heated recently, with some proposing the use of Niche...
Prearchaic Settlement Decisions in the Great Basin (2018)
Researchers propose that the first people to occupy the Great Basin preferentially settled near pluvial lakes to exploit highly profitable wetland habitats. However, a systematic evaluation of this hypothesis has yet to be undertaken. Here we test predictions from an ideal free distribution model to determine if the settlement decisions of Prearchaic foragers were indeed biased toward pluvial ecosystems. The results not only elucidate Prearchaic settlement patterns, but also establish...
Prey Choice and Politics: Modelling Postclassic Maya Wood Selection at La Punta, Chiapas, Mexico (2018)
How did Postclassic Maya communities decide which tree species to harvest for firewood and timber in a diverse forest environment? Most studies of ancient tree selection have used the principles of optimal foraging to construct a baseline of expectations for interpreting archaeological charcoal datasets. This paper will explore the implications of such a model on the interpretation of wood charcoals from the site of La Punta in Chiapas, Mexico, while also considering how the political structure...
Proboscideans, Drought, and Cyanobacteria: Natural Death Events both Present and Past (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lawrence Todd has made substantial contributions to the studies of taphonomy, Paleoindians, and megafauna, among other topics. His foundational research provides the basis for important questions to be asked about megafaunal extinctions. Drawing first on data on elephant deaths in northern Botswana in 2020 that...
Reflections on the Life, Career and Influence of Stephen D. Fretwell (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Steve Fretwell served as a Visiting Maytag Professor at Arizona State University in the Biology Department in 1976-1977. He was a well-published, aspiring young evolutionary ecologist and taught several courses and seminars. I was a first-year graduate student in anthropology at that time and had...
Rethinking Ecological Verticality for the Initial Period: A Case from South-Central Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Murra’s model of the vertical archipelago continues to reverberate in discussions of ecological exploitation across Andean regions, while other scholars have argued that such frameworks essentialize Andean societies by projecting ethnohistorical data onto the deep past. New ceramic, microbotanical, and isotopic evidence from Atalla and other sites in the...
Rethinking Prehistoric Hillforts in the Eastern Adriatic from a Human Behavioral Ecology Perspective (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia and stretching for kilometers inland and along the shores of the Eastern Adriatic are massive drystone ramparts and enclosures that litter hilltops. These structures are known as hillforts, are poorly understood, and are colloquially assumed to date to the Iron Age, as there is scant settlement evidence in the area dating to...
Risky Business? Prey Choice in Pleistocene and Holocene Northern Australia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although archaeofaunal assemblages from northern Australia are limited, records indicate an early adoption of "broad-spectrum" diets. Inland, key prey items consist of small- to medium-sized mammals and reptiles, with large kangaroos being exploited less frequently. On the coast, shellfish, fish...
The Role of Future Discounting in Subsistence Decisions: The Case of Hohokam Agave Farming (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will investigate the relevance of future discounting behavior to precolonial subsistence decisions by examining *Agave sp. bajada cultivation among the Hohokam of southern Arizona during the Classic period, AD 1150–1450. The Hohokam Classic period was tumultuous and included a variety of social...
The Role of Human Predation in the Structuring of Prehistoric Prey Populations in Northwestern California (BLM) (2008)
A doctoral dissertation by Adrian Whitaker. This paper discusses the implications of faunal remains found at nine prehistoric archaeological sites in Humboldt and Mendocino Counties, California for the effects human predation had on populations of mussels, artiodactyls, and sea mammals.
Site Clustering Parallels Initial Domestication in Eastern North America (2018)
Dense human settlements often emerge following a shift to agricultural economies, yet researchers still debate the underlying cause of this pattern. One driver may be what is known in ecology as an Allee effect, a positive relationship between population density and per capita utility. Allee effects may emerge with economies of scale such as those created by some forms of intensified food acquisition and production. Thus, in an Allee-like setting, individuals belonging to larger groups enjoy the...
Small Carnivore Use in the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic of Kephalari Cave (Peloponnese, Greece): Opportunistic or Optimal? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Pleistocene of southern Greece adheres to many predictions set forth by human behavioral ecology concerning the use of small game in the face of demographic growth, ecological change, and advancements in procurement technologies. In Peloponnese, an increase in small, fast game use...
Social Boundaries and The Cultural Ecology of Artiodactyl Hunting in Prehistoric Central California (2017)
We use a model developed using Geographical Information Systems software to examine the extent to which the suitability of habitat surrounding archaeological sites in Central California affected hunting decisions for three artiodactyl taxa: elk (Cervus elaphus), deer (Odocoileus hemionus), and pronghorn (Antilocapra americana). Model findings are compared to a database of 100 archaeofaunal assemblages from the same area. We find that the model predicts the presence and relative abundance of elk...
Sourcing a State: A Systematic Survey and Statistical Analysis of Wyoming Archaeological Assemblages of Lithic Raw Materials (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This pilot study will systematize the spatial distribution of lithic raw materials in Wyoming by using statistical methods. It revisits decades of curated assemblages from the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository and places them on the geological landscape using GIS and cluster analyses. Through a systematic sampling strategy of the lithic raw...
Stable Isotope Evidence of Seasonal Shellfish Harvesting and Consumption in Prehistoric Central California (2017)
Shellfish played an important role in the diet of prehistoric hunter-gatherers of Central California. They were the dominant visible component in the large shellmounds that once lined the San Francisco Bay shoreline. Although Bay shellfish are present at inland sites as well, little is known about the role of shellfish in the diet and lifeways of interior populations that hauled the resource in from the Bay. This study focuses on findings from CA-SCL-330, an inland Late Period site in the Diablo...
A Stone in the Hand Is Worth How Many in the Bush? Applying the Marginal Value Theorem to Understand Optimal Toolstone Transportation, Processing, and Discard Decisions (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Obtaining and transporting material for manufacturing flaked stone tools comes at a cost. Numerous studies evaluate how processing may reduce transport costs, often using theory from optimal foraging theory such as central place foraging and field processing models. However, to date these studies do not adequately address the continued reuse of toolstone...
Swordfish Hunting as Prestige Signaling within Middle Holocene Fishing Communities of the Atacama Desert Coast? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since around 8500 years BP, the archaeological record on the Southern Coast of the Atacama Desert shows evidence of growing population density and low residential mobility. A maritime specialization process is also evident by a rich set of specialized tools, and a pronounced increase...