Men at Work: Economic Complexity and Exploitation of Dietary Marine Protein Sources in the San Francisco Bay Area

Summary

In the San Francisco Bay Area, distinct dietary niches were exploited in prehistory, and these different food economies are most readily distinguished in terms of their primary protein sources. This paper highlights the use of external auditory exostoses (EAE), a pathology linked to the exploitation of marine resources in cold water, to evaluate varying economic complexity in acquisition of marine protein food sources between different sites around the Bay Area. The high occurrence of EAE in males compared to females across the Bay Area suggests that the males were habitually exposed to cold water and/or sea spray at a higher frequency than females. This indicates that males were likely the primary procurers of marine dietary resources, which supports ethnohistoric observations that men were primarily responsible for fishing activities. However, there is variation of occurrence of EAE between sites within the Bay Area suggesting that there was a varying degree of reliance on a marine substance economy across the region, supporting the general trends seen in the isotopic evidence.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancestral Native American Archaeology of the San Francisco Bay Area   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage