Human Behavioral Ecology (Other Keyword)
51-75 (131 Records)
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...
Examining the Trade-Off between Food Acquisition and Violence Avoidance: Population-Level Effects and Variability in Risk-Preference (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. Resource procurement and the avoidance of interpersonal violence are critical features of human survival strategies. Yet these features are often competing, requiring individuals to make trade-offs in order to maximize fitness. Recent decades of research have shown violence to be a pervasive, albeit variable,...
Experimental Construction of Hunter-Gatherer Residential Features, Mobility, and the Costs of Occupying "Persistent Places" (2019)
This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Temporal and caloric costs associated with building common hunter-gatherer residential features – housefloors, housepits, storage pits, rock rings, and various types of wickiups – are presented based on experimental construction of these types of features. For subsurface features, excavation rates and...
Explaining Paleoindian Settlement in the Intermountain West: A Regression Adjustment Approach (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the ecological drivers of Paleoindian settlement has broad implications for a host of related behaviors, including colonization, mobility, and subsistence. Unfortunately, important proxies like spatial site patterning suffer from well-known sampling biases, most notably, taphonomic decay, opportunistic survey,...
Fish Body Size and Ancestral Pueblo Foraging Decisions in New Mexico, ca. AD 1350–1600 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Small numbers of fish remains are frequently recovered from Pueblo IV (AD 1350–1600) sites in the Middle Rio Grande basin of central New Mexico, but they are rare during earlier time periods. Increased aquatic habitat quality during this time could have increased fish body size and the energy obtained by Ancestral Puebloan fishers could have been...
Food from the Barranca: A 13,000-Year Perspective from the Yuzanú Drainage of the Mixteca Alta (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Barrancas are marginal spaces in the cultural ecology and cultural perceptions of modern-day inhabitants and visitors of the Mixteca Alta. They tend to be little-contested commons where the poor graze their animals, hunt, gather fuelwood and occasional culinary curiosities. They rarely figure in the villagers' get-rich schemes or outsiders' research...
Free or Despotic? The Distribution of Hunter-Gatherer Ethnolinguistic Groups in California (2015)
How do hunter-gatherers divide their landscape into territories? In this paper, I will delve into results from a prior study showing a significant difference in territory size between coastal and inland groups in California (Dennehy et al. 2014). I will first simulate territory sizes and locations using an Agent-Based Model (ABM) of hunter-gatherer bands. The model will draw on human behavioral ecology to simulate distribution of foraging groups under three different conditions of social...
Freshwater and Anadromous Fishing in Ice Age Beringia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Alaska, the Gateway to the Americas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While freshwater and anadromous fishing are critical economic resources for late prehistoric and modern Indigenous peoples in western North America, the origin and development of fishing is not well understood. Here we present results from investigations into all reported fish assemblages in central Alaska earlier than 7000 cal yr BP....
From Tlacolol to Metepantle: A Reappraisal of the Antiquity of the Agricultural Niches of the Central Mexican Symbiotic Region (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the benefit of a culture-ecological mindset and thousands of man-hours spent in the then still extensive countryside of the Basin of Mexico, The Book devoted many pages to the discussion of traditional farming techniques, potential maize yields, and abandoned agricultural...
Geoarchaeological Investigations at White Pond, Elgin, SC (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The White Pond Human Paleoecology Project is a collaborative effort between multiple institutions and researchers to study the geology, archaeology, and paleoecology of White Pond in South Carolina. Building on the seminal work of Watts (1980), this research seeks to: 1) derive the broader geologic context of the age and origin of White Pond and its fringing...
Geology, Historical Contingency, and Ecological Inheritance in California's Southern Sierra Nevada (2015)
The Late prehistoric archaeological record of the Southern Sierra Nevada can be distilled down to two very visible elements: bedrock mortars and obsidian. Both were imported from outside the area, with obsidian coming from the east and the idea of the bedrock mortar coming from the west. We argue that the presence of transported obsidian, much of it deposited prior to 1000 cal BP, and the later establishment of bedrock mortars encouraged more persistent use of this landscape. We see this as an...
A GIS Analysis of Ancient Human Trails, Human Behavioral Ecology, and Agency in the Mojave and Colorado Desert (2018)
Desert environments pose challenging conditions to human travel in the form of exposure to intense weather and access to important water sources. Environmental constraints of the desert can explain people’s decisions to consider energy-efficient modes of travel through the framework of Human Behavioral Ecology. Culture, however, does not always follow the model of Human Behavioral Ecology, even in environments posing challenges that require efficient ways of living. Cultural knowledge, beliefs,...
An HBE Perspective on Niche Construction (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of research in human behavioral ecology (HBE) demonstrates that questions about human ecological and reproductive adaptations generally lead to questions about cooperation. Partly for this reason, much recent research in HBE has focused on issues such as marriage, cooperative child raising, and...
High Altitude Settlement as Evolutionary Process (2018)
The peopling of high altitudes and altitude’s ecological analog, high latitude, are critical to understanding worldwide human dispersals and the diversity of human adaptation but are still quite poorly understood. Within this context, this paper presents a model for the initiation, establishment, and maintenance of permanent high altitude settlements, especially in middle latitudes. This model takes into account the limiting factors found in such settings, the costs and benefits of different...
Howdy Neighbour – Transgressing Borders and Peering over the Fence to Examine the Application of Isotopic Analyses to Bioarchaeology in Anatolia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotope analyses contributing to archaeological research in Anatolia was a relatively late bloomer, beginning in the early 2000s and only gathering pace in the last 5-10 years. Currently research into dietary habits, subsistence practices, and mobility has...
Human Behavioral Ecology and the Complexities of Arctic Foodways (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. In this paper we will examine whether Arctic and Subarctic coasts have unique characteristics in the context of human behavioral ecology (HBE). We start with a review of the variability in maritime adaptations around the circumpolar north, and then examine efforts to apply HBE models...
Intentional Sustainability in Human Behavioral Ecology: Modeling Athabascan Caribou Predation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The paradigm of Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) utilizes behavioral ecological models to understand the adaptive relationship between human behavior and the environment in which people reside. The introduction of intentional sustainability to HBE models benefits this paradigm by diversifying the factors that influence human behavior and developing a greater...
Island Arrivals: the Ideal Free Distribution and Prey Choice Models in Neolithic Taiwan and Beyond (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Neolithic transition of Taiwan, current evidence indicates that farmer-gardeners immigrated from China's southeast coast about 6,000 BP and brought a diverse subsistence of cultivation, foraging, and fishing. The migration would have influenced habitat choice and interactions with Paleolithic foragers already existed in residence. The Ideal Free...
An Islandscape IFD: Predicting Archaeological Settlements from Grenada to St. Vincent, Eastern Caribbean (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. Building on the Caribbean-wide models presented in Giovas and Fitzpatrick (2014) and predictive models recently synthesized for Grenada, this study focuses on a fine-grained analysis of environmental and cultural factors affecting settlement locations in the multi-island/archipelagic region from...
Khao Toh Chong Rockshelter, Krabi: A reflection on human behavioral adaptations driven by environmental change during prehistory (2015)
Human behavioral adaptation to environmental change (i.e., sea level rise, monsoonal events) in Southern Thailand is an area of archaeology that has not yielded much study due to the preservation issues or sampling techniques. In a case study approach, geoscience and archaeological methods were utilized to trace environmental and cultural shifts at a rockshelter site occupied throughout the late-Pleistocene and Holocene. Results from this case study begin to answer questions about the foraging...
Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points in Arctic Alaska (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large, shoulderless stemmed bifacial projectile points are a hallmark of the late Pleistocene age Sluiceway complex represented in more than two dozen sites northern Alaska. This paper discusses the dating of this technology and potential relationship to fluted projectile point and...
Leveraging Behavioral Ecology to Understand the Relationship between Resource Availability and Human Violence (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Violence is a pervasive feature of human prehistory, and its traces can be found throughout the archaeological record. Collective violence has important effects on individual survival and is thought to play a critical role in the evolution of complex social systems. However, participation in coalitionary violence elicits a collective action problem and...
Life and Death of a Middle Preclassic Individual from Aguada Fénix, Tabasco (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore a Middle Preclassic skeleton from the site of Aguada Fénix, Tabasco. It is one of the scarce cases of the early temporality in the Maya area. We first describe in detail its archaeological context and osteological sex and age-at-death and infer...
Linking Landscapes and Resources to Settlement Decisions in Ancient Low-Density Cities in the Southeastern Maya Lowlands (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper compares the developmental trajectories of two Classic Period (AD 300 – 800) Maya centers, Ix Kuku’il and Uxbenká, located in the southern foothills of the Maya Mountains, Toledo District, Belize. High-precision radiocarbon dates and ceramic sequences from household contexts inform the chronological development within these communities. Initial...