Niche Construction Theory (Other Keyword)
1-6 (6 Records)
How can anthropologists assess the pattern of complex decision-making that early humans undertook when navigating social networks and what role does this ability, which we might call wisdom, play in the origin & development of the cultural human experience? While it is clear that there are behaviors unique to humans such as the creation of complex lithic artifacts, unaddressed for the most part has been how behaviors such as collaboration, land use patterns/long-distance raw material transport,...
Feast or Famine: The Broad Spectrum Revolution Revisited (2015)
Widely accepted models for the diversification of subsistence economies that preceded the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East frame this key transition in the context of demographically induced resource pressure following a diet breadth model of forager decision making. Many of the supporting arguments for this scenario are open to an alternative view that casts these developments within the context of resource abundance and enhanced predictability. Contrasting explanatory...
From Neutral to Mutual: A Long-Term Perspective on Human-Rabbit Relationships in Highland Mexico (2018)
Studies of human-animal relationships provide insights into multiple issues relevant to archaeological research, including changes in human-environmental interactions, subsistence strategies, and socio-cultural dynamics. This presentation investigates the relationship between humans and rabbits (cottontails and jackrabbits), which were among the most commonly consumed animals in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Focusing primarily on the settlement of Teotihuacan in the Basin of Mexico during the...
OFT and EVO-DEVO: Antithetical or mutually beneficial? (2015)
Short-term constraints that motivate people are an important part of the process social and economic change. Proximate decision (optimality or satisficing) models are particularly useful in archaeology because they play upon basic resource needs and costs in situations where behavior cannot be observed directly. These models are not enough, however, to account for the larger processes by which repeated interactions change the nature of the co-evolving species and the conditions of selection...
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...
Reaping the Rewards of Incipient Agriculture from the Land to the Sea and the Mangroves In Between (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Archaic to Early Formative transition, the Soconusco populations began adopting more sedentary subsistence strategies and investing more in their local environments. Evidence from sediment cores demonstrates that during the Archaic, populations were burning inland landscapes and starting to grow maize. The environmental effects of incipient...