Human Behavioral Ecology (Other Keyword)
76-100 (131 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of hereditary social inequality resulted in enormous impacts on human history, yet its causes remain heavily debated and unexplained. Here we propose and evaluate an environmentally informed model explaining the emergence of social inequality based on the interaction between circumscription and environmental inequality. We demonstrate how the...
Martu Ethnoarchaeology: Foraging, Site Structure and the Scales of Constraint on Human Behavior (2015)
In his watershed 1995 publication, O’Connell outlined the utility of approaching ethnoarchaeology through a general theory of behavior by noting the disparity between studies examining faunal remains and those attempting to explain site structure. While the former was finding great success by drawing on models from behavioral ecology, the later was stagnant and lacking a general theory of behavior. Drawing on ethnoarchaeological data collected with Martu Aboriginal foragers, we highlight a...
Maya Structures for Wet and Dry Seasons: Adaptive Strategies and Microenvironments at the Site of Chulub in the Crooked Tree Lagoon System (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study evaluates a water feature and two associated structures within the Late Terminal/Early Postclassic Maya site of Chulub in the Western Lagoon Wetlands near the island of Crooked Tree, Belize. The term “pocket *bajo” is a term used to describe water features that are similar to...
Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany (2014)
Paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, is poised at the intersection of the study of the past and concerns of the present, including agricultural decision making, biodiversity, and global environmental change, and has much to offer to archaeology, anthropology, and the interdisciplinary study of human relationships with the natural world. Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany demonstrates those connections and highlights the increasing relevance of the study of past...
The More Things Change, the More They Change: Persistence and Evolution in the Gulf of Maine Archaic Tradition (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gulf of Maine Archaic Tradition has been defined as a persistent technological pattern that spans the Early to Middle Archaic Periods ca. 9,500-6,000 B.P. in the northeast, although sites containing this component have remained poorly documented. It is possible that human population density in New England was low throughout...
A Multiproxy Analysis of Fire, Vegetation, Climatic, and Anthropogenic Activity during the Mid- to Late Holocene in the West Desert of Utah, United States (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pollen from cave sediments within Hogup Cave and pollen and macroscopic charcoal found in a nearby 268 cm sediment core were analyzed and used as proxies to reconstruct the paleoecological and anthropogenic record of Hogup Cave and the surrounding region, found in the West Desert of Utah. The relationship between Paleoindians and their use of the...
Obsidian Trade vs. Direct Acquisition: A View from Central California (2018)
Geochemical sourcing of lithic artifacts has proven to be a useful analytical tool for the studies of trade and mobility in the archaeological record. However, it is difficult to distinguish lithic material acquired through exchange from material acquired directly from the source. Economic models of lithic reduction suggest that material procured for the purpose of exchange may be treated differently than material procured for personal consumption. I compare obsidian source profiles and lithic...
On the way to the islands: the role of early domestic plants in the initial peopling of the Antilles (2016)
Indigenous people initiated their dispersal toward the Caribbean isles at sometime around 8000 to 7800 years before present. This time framework coincides with the consolidation/aggregation and eventual transference of new dietary suites (domestic plants) to long distances, having been this process one that initiated at least in two different and mutually distant regions of continental America. This presentation explores the feasibility of the ideal free distribution (IFD) and diet breadth (DB)...
Paleofecal Analysis from a Human Behavioral Ecology Perspective (2017)
Paleofecal research has benefited from many recent methodological advances, such as SEM and high-throughput DNA sequencing. However, as our results grow both more robust and more precise, our interpretations have not always followed suit. Researchers are eager to establish what was on the menu, but often more cautious in exploring the biocultural and evolutionary implications of those findings. Some scholars have argued that it is difficult to apply human behavioral ecology (HBE) models to...
Paleoindian Settlement of the Central Great Basin: Testing Environmental, Radiocarbon, and Lithic Proxies with Data from Grass Valley, Nevada (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Explaining Paleoindian settlement decisions in the Central Great Basin remains an important though controversial topic. Unfortunately, the limited archaeological and paleoenvironmental records from the region make progress on this issue challenging. To help address some of the problems of limited data in order to better...
Persistence in Turkey Husbandry Practices in the Southwest and Four Corners Region: The Isotopic and Ethnohistorical Evidence (2018)
Research has demonstrated an independent domestication event of Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) occurred in the Southwestern USA between 200 BC—AD 500, which was separate from the domestication of turkey within the Mesoamerican world. While aDNA analyses revealed this as a separate and distinct event, we still know little about how turkey husbandry was practiced in the prehistoric Southwest, USA, Northwest, Mexico, and Four Corners regions. Our research applies carbon and nitrogen isotopes to a...
Phytolithic Analysis of Site FxJj 20 AB (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Controlled fire could have significantly impacted hominin evolution, providing an adaptive release resulting in reduced teeth and gut size, and larger brains. Evidence of hominin controlled fire is sparse in the early Pleistocene archaeological record. These sites are usually in open-air contexts where taphonomic factors can obscure the identification of...
Population Dynamics and Subsistence Variability on the Farming/Hunter-Gatherer Boundary: Central Western Argentina as a Case Study (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This case study integrates times-series of multiple types of proxy to evaluate causal relationships between population dynamic, subsistence/diet variation, and ecosystem change. The presentation evaluates whether intensification based on wild and domesticated resources takes different evolutionary...
The Potential Integration of Niche Construction Theory into the Framework of Human Behavioral Ecology (2015)
Throughout the history of hominid evolution, our ancestors developed the ability to adapt to extremely different environments and eventually colonize the entire world. The capacity to adapt to environments as different as the Amazon Rainforest and the Arctic tundra is complex, and has led some anthropologists to question the utility of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary frameworks. The debate over the utility of these frameworks has become more heated recently, with some proposing the use of Niche...
Prearchaic Settlement Decisions in the Great Basin (2018)
Researchers propose that the first people to occupy the Great Basin preferentially settled near pluvial lakes to exploit highly profitable wetland habitats. However, a systematic evaluation of this hypothesis has yet to be undertaken. Here we test predictions from an ideal free distribution model to determine if the settlement decisions of Prearchaic foragers were indeed biased toward pluvial ecosystems. The results not only elucidate Prearchaic settlement patterns, but also establish...
Prey Choice and Politics: Modelling Postclassic Maya Wood Selection at La Punta, Chiapas, Mexico (2018)
How did Postclassic Maya communities decide which tree species to harvest for firewood and timber in a diverse forest environment? Most studies of ancient tree selection have used the principles of optimal foraging to construct a baseline of expectations for interpreting archaeological charcoal datasets. This paper will explore the implications of such a model on the interpretation of wood charcoals from the site of La Punta in Chiapas, Mexico, while also considering how the political structure...
Proboscideans, Drought, and Cyanobacteria: Natural Death Events both Present and Past (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lawrence Todd has made substantial contributions to the studies of taphonomy, Paleoindians, and megafauna, among other topics. His foundational research provides the basis for important questions to be asked about megafaunal extinctions. Drawing first on data on elephant deaths in northern Botswana in 2020 that...
Reflections on the Life, Career and Influence of Stephen D. Fretwell (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. Steve Fretwell served as a Visiting Maytag Professor at Arizona State University in the Biology Department in 1976-1977. He was a well-published, aspiring young evolutionary ecologist and taught several courses and seminars. I was a first-year graduate student in anthropology at that time and had...
Rethinking Ecological Verticality for the Initial Period: A Case from South-Central Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Murra’s model of the vertical archipelago continues to reverberate in discussions of ecological exploitation across Andean regions, while other scholars have argued that such frameworks essentialize Andean societies by projecting ethnohistorical data onto the deep past. New ceramic, microbotanical, and isotopic evidence from Atalla and other sites in the...
Rethinking Prehistoric Hillforts in the Eastern Adriatic from a Human Behavioral Ecology Perspective (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia and stretching for kilometers inland and along the shores of the Eastern Adriatic are massive drystone ramparts and enclosures that litter hilltops. These structures are known as hillforts, are poorly understood, and are colloquially assumed to date to the Iron Age, as there is scant settlement evidence in the area dating to...
Risky Business? Prey Choice in Pleistocene and Holocene Northern Australia (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. Although archaeofaunal assemblages from northern Australia are limited, records indicate an early adoption of "broad-spectrum" diets. Inland, key prey items consist of small- to medium-sized mammals and reptiles, with large kangaroos being exploited less frequently. On the coast, shellfish, fish...
A River Runs through It: Tales of River Management Practices on the Great Hungarian Plain (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People are intricately connected to the land around them, and throughout time, people have manipulated their surroundings to better fit their immediate social, cultural, economic, or subsistence needs with little to no thought about long-term environmental consequences. The Great Hungarian Plain is no exception, and during different periods in the past,...
The Role of Future Discounting in Subsistence Decisions: The Case of Hohokam Agave Farming (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. This presentation will investigate the relevance of future discounting behavior to precolonial subsistence decisions by examining *Agave sp. bajada cultivation among the Hohokam of southern Arizona during the Classic period, AD 1150–1450. The Hohokam Classic period was tumultuous and included a variety of social...
The Role of Human Predation in the Structuring of Prehistoric Prey Populations in Northwestern California (BLM) (2008)
A doctoral dissertation by Adrian Whitaker. This paper discusses the implications of faunal remains found at nine prehistoric archaeological sites in Humboldt and Mendocino Counties, California for the effects human predation had on populations of mussels, artiodactyls, and sea mammals.
Sexual Division of Labor and Technological Change at the Pleistocene to Holocene Transition in the Great Basin. (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recent reinterpretation of global ethnography challenges the "men hunt, women gather" stereotype, finding cross-cultural evidence that women regularly hunted in foraging societies. Another study finds bioarchaeological evidence of women's role in hunting large game during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in the Americas. Although provocative, these...