Human Behavioral Ecology (Other Keyword)
26-50 (120 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehistory of the Sinlahekin Valley in north central Washington State is not well known. The archaeological record suggests the valley has attracted human occupants since the terminal Pleistocene. Various riparian, lacustrine, and mixed conifer ecosystems with the high elevation of surrounding mountain peaks have provided access to multifarious floral and...
Commodification and Resource Depression of White-Tailed Deer in Seventeenth-Century New England (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While white-tailed deer were hunted by Native peoples in eastern North America for thousands of years, historical evidence suggests that deer populations declined dramatically following European colonization. Yet questions remain about the exact timing and causes of this decline. To address these questions, I analyzed zooarchaeological data from...
Competing with the Crown: Early Spanish Mission Settlement Decisions in a Human Behavioral Ecology Model (2018)
Models developed from principles in human behavioral ecology have long benefited archaeological research. Drawing on natural features in the modern landscape, locations of prehistoric settlements can be evaluated in terms of calculable suitability. Such models also have predictive potential, as they can rank loci in terms of any combination of environmental conditions appropriate to the archaeological context being investigated. Where available, careful examination of ethnohistoric and...
Considering Women's Tech Choices: Grinding Efficiency and Performance Characteristics of Hunter-Gatherer Milling Tools (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Formal Models and Experimental Archaeology of Ground Stone Milling Technology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Milling tools were a cornerstone of many plant-based hunter-gatherer economies. Women are often involved in food processing and would have used these tools, in some cases daily, to expand the breadth of foods available for consumption. Despite their important economic role, few studies have compared...
Cooperative Foraging Strategies and Technological Investment in the Western Great Basin: An Investigation of Archaeological Remains from the Winnemucca Lake Caves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates evidence for the intensity and development of cooperative foraging strategies and investment in cordage and lithic technologies through time in the western Great Basin. It specifically addresses (1) when the region’s inhabitants invested in cordage technology used to create cooperation-oriented nets; (2) when the region’s inhabitants...
Crop Management and Domestication in Eastern North America Inspired Both Cooperative Niche Construction and Territorial Competition (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. Much recent research has emphasized the importance of both within-group cooperation and between-group competition in the human past. We hypothesize that the shift from foraging to food production in Eastern North America provided novel ecological conditions which impacted human sociality in the...
A cross-cultural analysis of the impact of diet breadth on subsistence toolkit richness and complexity (2015)
Identifying the causes of spatiotemporal variation in technological richness and complexity is an important task for archaeology. James O’Connell has proposed that diet breadth can be expected to affect investment in subsistence technology and therefore the number and intricacy of subsistence tools. Narrower diets, he suggests, will be associated with lower investment and therefore fewer and/or less complex tools, while broader diets will be associated with higher investment and therefore more...
The Curious Case of Bunnies: Human Behavioral Ecology Perspectives on Fauna from Homol’ovi I, Room 733 (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. Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) models are useful in linking the composition of faunal assemblages deposited in archaeological sites to environmental conditions at the time of their deposition, but questions remain about HBE’s utility in evaluating assemblages dominated by small fauna. In this...
Decomposing Habitat Suitability With Theory-Driven Machine-Learning (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. Archaeological applications of ideal distribution models have advanced beyond the study of straightforward settlement decisions to address a variety of important but difficult anthropological questions. To aid in these investigations, we demonstrate a method for (i) decomposing habitat...
Defining Suitability in Mixed Pastoral-Agricultural Societies: A Case Study from Bactria in Northern Afghanistan (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. This paper explores the concept of suitability as a guiding parameter for applications of the Ideal Free/Despotic Distribution (IFD/IDD) in cases of mixed pastoral and agricultural economies. We briefly review recent archaeological survey data and research from Central Asia to contextualize how...
Developing an Ecological Interpretation of Land Use in Virginia’s Piedmont: The Montpelier Example (2016)
Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) provides an intriguing opportunity for the interpretation of plantation management strategies. HBE has been applied with some interesting results to interpretations of past human behavior, but many claim it is inappropriate to interpret past life through the application of economic theory developed in the modern era. This approach is also criticized as a reductionist analytical approach based in conservative microeconomic theory. In light of these...
Deviant or Normal? Assessing Anomalies in Middle Stone Age Small Prey Exploitation (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. Studies of forager economies in southern Africa have documented changes in subsistence strategies between the Middle and Later Stone Age. As evidenced by the disproportionate frequencies of faunal remains from large, gregarious grazers, the prevailing interpretation has been that MSA foragers...
Diet Reconstruction of Ancient Population from Banlashan Cemetry, a Neolithic Hongshan Archaeological Culture Site in China—Based on Stable Isotopic and Dental Microwear Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hongshan culture is a famous archaeological cultures in the Neolithic Age in China, and its economic structure has always been the focus of academic attention. According to the bone material unearthed from the cemetery, the diet characteristics of the late Hongshan people can be effectively recovered through the integrating stable isotopic and dental microwear...
Diversity and Development of Property Rights and Money in the Southern Pacific Northwest Coast (2017)
At contact, property rights systems in northwestern California and southwestern Oregon were complex and diverse, and applied to a wide range of sacred places and items as well as use rights to foods and materials associated with a highly productive (yet very patchy) resource base. Use rights and possession extended from property that was commonly owned (e.g., game, line fishing locations) to individually owned property (e.g., productive salmon weir locations and acorn groves, dance rights,...
Dynamic Simulation of Large Herbivore Distribution during the Last Glacial Maximum: Implications for the Distribution of Human Populations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study we propose the use of agent-based modelling (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) to test the impact of predator-prey relationships on the distribution of prehistoric human populations. Our research goal is to establish a dynamic model of the distribution of large herbivores that constituted the main food source for...
Early Human Biology, Ecology, and Archaeology in the Lowland Tropics of Central America (2018)
Renewed focus on Paleoamerican and archaic peoples across Mesoamerica have broadened our understanding of those time periods. However, few stratified sites have been documented. We present new data from two multi-component rockshelters located in the Bladen Nature Reserve in the Maya Mountains of Belize. We document persistent use of these rockshelters from the late Pleistocene through the Maya collapse and suggest these spaces were used for animal processing, tool reduction, and as...
Ecological Succession of the Laurentide Ice Sheet: A Study of Human Colonization Lag in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Radiocarbon Record (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ice margin chronology for North America provides archaeologists with discrete spatial units, much like stratigraphic units of an excavation grid, that aid in interpreting the archaeological record of colonizing populations. Treating deglaciation as an opening for a subsequent colonization event, ice recession helps contextualize Paleoindian population...
The Ecology of Agglomeration and the Rise of Chaco Great Houses (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decisions individuals make about where to live have profound consequences for everything from climate and conflict, to migration, inequality, the origins of agriculture, and urban development. It is not surprising that understanding and explaining those decisions remains an open and active area of research within archaeology. Many of the important...
The Ecology of Cooking with Firewood (2018)
Cooking food conferred an energetic advantage to our pre-human ancestors and became one of the hallmark characteristics of the human strategy set. Accessing fuel remains a common problem for many human societies. Yet anthropologists do not often take the costs of gathering fuel into account when modeling subsistence and settlement. This paper presents a model that incorporates firewood tradeoffs into human choices about what to eat and where to live, and examines a hypothetical case for the...
The Edible and Incredible Hare (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. Zooarchaeological applications of the Prey Choice Model (PCM) are often based on the assumption that prey body-size is a robust proxy for prey rank and post-encounter return rate. In zooarchaeological assemblages, co-variation in the abundances of large and small-sized prey are often viewed as...
Effects of Atmospheric Events over Marine Ecosystems and Precolumbian Societies in Borikén (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate change, as a social and environmental stressor, has the potential to threaten food security by disrupting the functioning of ecosystems. This stress is particularly enhanced during intense, unexpected events that can trigger disasters. Precolumbian Caribbean societies faced these stressors through time as environmental changes linked to climate change...
The Energetics of Butchery (2018)
Animal butchery is an important aspect of human evolution. While it provides obvious nutritional and non-nutritional benefits, the choice to butcher an animal involves costs. These costs are primarily time, energy. Most research investigating these costs has focused on time alone. By creating ranking schemes using post-encounter return rates, researchers usually hypothesize which animals or body parts hunters should butcher. Yet, the energetic cost of butchery and its effects on these rankings...
Ethnoarchaeology of Water Resources in a Landscape without Rivers: Using Limestone Solution Cavities to Study Settlement and Subsistence Activities in a Yucatec Maya Community, Mexico (2018)
Ethnoarchaeological investigations in the Yucatec Maya community of Xculoc recently included inventorying the location and uses of a range of small-large water sources. This karst landscape has no surface rivers, ponds, or lakes. Currently, the community uses a deep well at the former hacienda in this location. However, at least 60 years ago most families that coalesced into this village were distributed in relation to smaller reliable water sources near the current community location. Field...
Evaluating a Stratified, Prearchaic, Open-Air Site in Grass Valley, Nevada (2018)
Current views of the Prearchaic draw heavily from investigations of sites near pluvial lakes in the eastern and western Great Basin. The record from the Central Great Basin remains impoverished, largely due to the limited number of stratified archaeological sites containing well preserved material suitable for faunal analysis and radiocarbon dating. Recent investigations of an open-air site (26La4434) along the northern shore of Pleistocene Lake Gilbert in Grass Valley, revealed a buried deposit...
An Examination of Food Storage Patterns in the Northern Southwest (2018)
The purpose of this project is to identify patterns in Ancestral Puebloan food storage across the northern Southwest between AD 950 and 1300. Using legacy data from the Grand Canyon, I examine characteristics of food storage in canyon environments and then compare the results to southeastern Utah. To combat harsh environmental conditions and secure reliable resources, ancient people stored food in sealed masonry structures, or granaries, protected in alcoves high on canyon walls. These...