Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology

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.