Ancient Alaskan Firewood Management Strategies and the Role of Selectivity: Preliminary Results

Summary

When historic Alaskans chose a settlement site, access to adequate fuel was as important as the availability of food and water. Despite its importance fuel use in the Arctic and Subarctic has received relatively little attention. Work currently underway aims to clarify the criteria used to select fuel in ancient Alaska by testing two hypotheses. The Efficiency Maximization hypothesis, derived from the prey choice model of human behavioral ecology, proposes that Alaskans ranked woody taxa according to net energy acquisition, and preferentially selected highly ranked taxa. The Firewood Indifference hypothesis proposes that Alaskans were not selective but rather sought to minimize the energy and time expended gathering firewood without regard for the specific properties of different taxa. This pattern is predicted by the prevailing fuel use model, the "Principle of Least Effort" (PLE), but is at odds with ethnography, which indicates that Native Alaskans discriminate between and seek specific wood(s) with preferred properties.

This paper reports the results of preliminary statistical analyses designed to determine which fuel-use model best explains the anthracological record for three Alaskan sites. These sites differ in cultural affiliation, ecological setting, and chronological position, and thus illustrate how different constraining variables determined fuel selection strategies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 19912