Diet, Sex, and Fitness: The Nutritional Potential of the Fish Slough Cave Diet Revisited

Summary

Archaeological investigations conducted in the late 1980s at Fish Slough Cave, Owens Valley, California recovered over 300 well-preserved human coprolites. When the nutritional profile of the diet inferred from coprolite analysis was compared against optimal foraging model predictions, based on energetic returns, the diet was considered to be deficient. However, when the same data were considered from a nutritional ecological perspective using macronutrients (e.g., water, protein, fat and carbohydrates) as the currency, the diet was more favorable. The current study goes a step further by taking a holistic approach and addressing nutritional needs based on age, sex, and level of activity and the role both macro- and micronutrients play in an individual’s overall fitness. This research, based on nutritional ecological principles, suggests that the variation in nutritional needs may in part have contributed to shifts in settlement and subsistence patterns observed in the Late Prehistoric Period.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

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