Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Behavioral Ecology is a well-established and productive research program, with decades of insightful output contributing greatly to our understanding of human adaptive diversity. Within the Society for American Archaeology, however, it has received only limited attention, mostly from archaeologists working with hunter-gatherers in western North America. Organized sessions explicitly devoted to behavioral ecology have been few and far between but are valuable to conference attendees. For that reason, we have organized this session to showcase critical work currently being done to advance Behavioral Ecology within archaeology. In particular, we hope to demonstrate that Behavioral Ecology is not confined to its traditional focus on subsistence and settlement dynamics among foragers, but rather provides a necessary and fruitful framework for studying a broad suite of complex behaviors within a wide variety of socio-environmental contexts, including social inequality, violent conflict, and geographic agglomeration.
Other Keywords
Human Behavioral Ecology •
Zooarchaeology •
Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling •
Historic •
demography •
Agriculture •
Hunter-Gatherers •
Foragers •
Colonialism •
Landscape Archaeology
Geographic Keywords
Arizona (State / Territory) •
United States of America (Country) •
Utah (State / Territory) •
Nevada (State / Territory) •
California (State / Territory) •
North America (Continent) •
USA (Country) •
North America: California and Great Basin •
Worldwide •
New Mexico (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)
- Documents (12)
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Behavioral Ecology and Evolutionary Approaches to Human-Environment Dynamics on Southwest Madagascar (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Madagascar’s southwestern coast has been inhabited by coastal foraging and fishing populations for over a millennium. Despite significant environmental changes in southwest Madagascar’s environment following human settlement, little is known about the scale, pace, and nature of human settlement and subsequent landscape modification. Recent...
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Behavioral Ecology and the Emergence of Sedentism and Agriculture (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than a decade after Niche Construction Theory was proposed as an alternative to behavioral ecological models in the study of agricultural origins, many misconceptions about behavioral ecology and its contribution to the study of the emergence of sedentism and agriculture remain. Here, I address some of these misconceptions and consider some new...
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Commodification and Resource Depression of White-Tailed Deer in Seventeenth-Century New England (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While white-tailed deer were hunted by Native peoples in eastern North America for thousands of years, historical evidence suggests that deer populations declined dramatically following European colonization. Yet questions remain about the exact timing and causes of this decline. To address these questions, I analyzed zooarchaeological data from...
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Density Dependent Models Rely on Accurate Population Estimates (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists increasingly leverage ideal distribution models to analyze settlement and demographic patterning in the past. Successful application requires adequate, spatially explicit proxies of both environmental suitability and past population. This paper focuses on the latter, recognizing that a growing number of studies rely on summaries of...
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Dimensions, Links, and Scales in the Behavioral Ecology of Inequality (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) initially focused on individual actors optimizing in a single decision category over very short time scales—“Robinson Crusoe rustles up lunch.” Current and future progress in HBE entails several intertwined developments, of which we address three: (a) attending to social dimensions, by drawing on evolutionary social...
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Ecological and Anthropogenetic Drivers of Artiodactyl Abundance and Distribution in Northeastern California: Implications for Social Signaling, Resource Intensification, and Resource Depression (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variation in large-game hunting has long been viewed as a primary driver influencing many aspects of change in human behavior and biology worldwide. In western North America, variation in Holocene artiodactyl (e.g., bison, deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep) hunting has often been examined from a behavioral ecological perspective to understand past...
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The Ecology of Agglomeration and the Rise of Chaco Great Houses (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decisions individuals make about where to live have profound consequences for everything from climate and conflict, to migration, inequality, the origins of agriculture, and urban development. It is not surprising that understanding and explaining those decisions remains an open and active area of research within archaeology. Many of the important...
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Leveraging Behavioral Ecology to Understand the Relationship between Resource Availability and Human Violence (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
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...
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Modeling Key Socioecological Factors Influencing the Expression of Egalitarianism and Inequality among Foragers (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding what favors egalitarian versus non-egalitarian resource access and patterns of behavior is a long-standing topic of interest, with much research narrowing in on potential social and environmental causes. Past modeling exercises have implemented game theoretic and simulation approaches to explore social patterns that may underlay...
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Stable Isotope Analysis of Dental Serial Sections Suggests Delayed Weaning among Archaic Foragers of the Andean Altiplano (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous research identifies delayed weaning as a behavioral adaptation to life at high altitude in the Andean and Tibetan highlands. This research examines the stable isotope chemistry of dental serial sections in Archaic period forager populations of the high Andes in the Lake Titicaca Basin to estimate weaning ages and the potential onset of delayed...
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Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene Exploitation of Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) in the Bonneville Basin (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite extensive study of prehistoric human foraging behavior in the Bonneville basin, little is known about human exploitation of birds, as many of these analyses focus on the hunting of mammalian prey and present models of diet breadth that are limited to artiodactyls and lagomorphs. This study uses the prey choice model of foraging theory to...
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What Can We Learn from Nearly 50 Years of Accumulated Data on the Kcal Return Rates Achieved by Hunters Encountering Terrestrial Game? (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-1970s the biologist D. Griffiths proposed that body size determines prey return rates and, citing the diet breadth model, D. S. Wilson stated that the lowest-ranked prey type harvested reveals the general efficiency of the foraging economy. Archaeologists, beginning with Bayham and Anderson, quickly made use of these proposals, initiating a...