Of Foragers and Farmers: The Influence of Population Interaction on Faunal Diversity and Abundances in Zooarchaeological Assemblages

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Zooarchaeological measures of faunal diversity are commonly used to assess prehistoric diet breadth, paleoenvironmental conditions, hunting technology, and economic orientation. In addition, hunter-gatherers are usually assumed to have more diverse faunal assemblages in comparison to food producers. Ethnoarchaeological data from central African neighboring foragers and farmers that have ongoing mutualistic interactions provides an exception. Although foragers directly procure a more diverse array of prey than farmers, the faunal assemblages associated with farmers are more diverse than those associated with foragers. Economic interactions including gift-giving, exchange, and debt repayment inflate the diversity of farmer-produced assemblages relative to those of foragers. These results support a reevaluation of the circumstances that produced forager faunal assemblages, especially when economic interaction involving the exchange of wild prey is possible. The results also provide an important guide to identifying prehistoric forager-food producer interactions in the zooarchaeological record.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35912.0