Childhood Diet and Foraging in Prehistoric Central California

Summary

Ethnographic evidence demonstrates that hunter-gatherer children may forage effectively, where ecology, subsistence strategies, and social organization are conducive to juvenile participation. We hypothesize that, in easily navigated environments with food items accessible to children, juveniles will engage in assistive or independent foraging after a period of exclusive post-weaning parental provisioning, and that differences in male and female diets will reflect the sexual division of labor among adults. We use stable isotope measures (δ15N and δ13C) from bone collagen and serial-samples of dentinal collagen extracted from first and third molars to examine childhood diet patterns, and find evidence for independent child foraging in Late Holocene Central California among groups exploiting low-ranking, sessile resources. Our study includes 115 individuals from ten San Francisco Bay Area archaeological sites.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Death of Primitive Economic Man: Nutritional Archaeology for the 21st Century

Keywords

Spatial Coverage