Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Human behavioral ecology or HBE is a powerful theoretical framework that has found successful application in the interpretation of forager economies worldwide. As our understanding of the faunal record has expanded in recent decades, many examples of deviations from traditional optimality models have emerged. In this session we explore use of small game through time and space, with the goal of examining situations where the exploitation of small prey appears to be unusual or unexpected. What do these trends mean and how are they to be explained? Does HBE fail in these situations, or do deviations serve as a signal that prey ranking, regional ecology, or technological solutions need to be examined in greater detail when constructing such models? By highlighting these case studies and critically examining how we frame our work, we hope to provide a more nuanced application of HBE.