intensification (Other Keyword)
1-9 (9 Records)
Intensification has long been equated with the rise of tightly-controlled economies, often in association with incipient social inequality. Previous research has sometimes suggested that centralized control is necessary both for the development of intensification as a viable economic strategy, and for the management of its repercussions. Here, we present evidence from Kolomoki, Crystal River, and Roberts Island, three prominent Late Woodland (ca. A.D. 500-1000) mound centers of the American...
Environmental Constraints and Plant Food Intensification in the Sacramento Valley (2015)
The Sacramento Valley bottom is a rich environment for faunal resources, notably fish, but lacks staple nut crops found elsewhere in interior central California. The absence of key nut resources appears to be the key factor in intensified production of geophytes and the early intensification of small seeds, especially Chenopodium spp. These features are absent in other regions in the rich archaeobotanical record of central California. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the...
The Faces of Intensification: An Application of Selection Thinking (2015)
The application of HBE and selection thinking can shed light on the study of intensification. This vantage treats intensification as a process, not a threshold, and treats behavior not as normative cultural forms (e.g., "intensive farmers"), but as fluctuating frequencies among alternative adaptive strategies comprising a behavioral mix that may be culturally encoded. There are many ways to work hard. Here we employ case studies from Mendoza, Argentina, and the Great Basin, Southwest, and...
Hunter-Gatherer Intensification and Long-Term Demography: A SW Wyoming Case Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The intensification of production by human groups has occurred at various times around the globe. Intensification correlates with increases in population size, increased labor investment in food production, and decreased residential mobility; the opposite (de-intensification) correlates with decreases in population size, decreased labor investments in food...
Intensification of Aquatic Resource Exploitation at the Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Boundary? (2015)
Intensive and specialized exploitation of marine resources has traditionally been attributed to the Early Holocene in Europe, from c. 11,500 cal BP (e.g. Clark 1965, 1975; von Brandt 1984) as a response to changing climate, reduction in large mammal biomass, and consequent broadening of the resource base. However, the technical sophistication of fishing gear recovered from Early Holocene archaeological contexts is suggestive of a long history of development. This paper presents a synthesis of...
Intensive Use of Wild Chenopodium by Central California Hunter Gatherers (2017)
Three decades of California paleoethnobotany have shown that Chenopodium is the most common small seed found in central California archaeological sites. Chenopodium is concentrated in sedentary residential communities in lowland areas, where historical population densities rivaled or exceeded those found elsewhere in the world. The most intensive use known for Chenopodium is from wetland areas of the Sacramento and Santa Clara valleys. Despite thousands of years as the pre-eminent small-seeded...
Native Irrigation in Owens Valley: The 2000 Year Back-story (2015)
Owens Valley is unique in that the Native Paiute were recorded as using irrigation to promote growth of certain crops such as taboose, Cyperus esculentus. This paper looks at the archaeological occurrence of the taboose tuber and other archaeobotanical remains in Owens Valley to explore the issue of whether Native irrigation would have made sense for this hunter-gatherer group. For roughly the last 2000 years of prehistory the Owens Valley archaeological record shows a cycle of alternating...
Oyster Mariculture on Florida’s Northern Gulf Coast: The Intensification of a Ritual Economy (2016)
Subsistence intensification among small-scale societies results from myriad circumstances, some of which involve demands that go beyond the scale of household production and consumption. The creation and use of ritual facilities, for instance, often entail large gatherings of persons that require provisioning. On the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, civic-ceremonial centers with elaborate mortuary facilities were established at about A.D. 200. A well-established subsistence economy of fish,...
Strengthening the State: Intensification and Mixed Agricultural Strategies in Late Postclassic Puebla-Tlaxcala (2015)
The development of agricultural technologies is a key element in theory concerning the growth of Mesoamerican state societies. Cultivation of species under improved environmental conditions suggests intensification oriented strategies for the finance of political institutions, and to attend auto-consumption needs of households at the subsistence level. During the Late Postclassic, the Puebla-Tlaxcala region witnessed the rise and consolidation of various rival state-level polities known locally...