Kroeber’s omnivore’s dilemma: regional perspectives on late Holocene human paleodiets in the San Francisco Bay area

Summary

The analysis of ancient hunter-gatherer diet in the San Francisco Bay Area has been the subject of enormous research effort over the past century. Hundreds of "shell mounds" that once dotted the landscape around the bayshore provide evidence for significant population growth during the Late Holocene. Resource intensification models link population increase to a shift away from exploitation of low-cost, high-ranked prey toward greater use of high-cost, low-ranked prey at a number of archaeological sites, a consequence of resource depression. However, these shifts in animal exploitation often do not track the relative importance of different food resources to the diet. In this study, we use stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes of bone collagen and stable carbon isotopes of bone apatite as a measure of the relative importance of marine versus terrestrial resources, trophic level, and variation in the non-protein sources of the diet within different microenvironments of the Bay Area. Results indicate that human diets are geographically-patterned, with a greater emphasis on higher trophic-level marine protein (marine fish, sea mammals) in the North Bay and greater emphasis on C3-terrestral and lower-trophic level resources in the South Bay. Temporal patterns, while noted, are most meaningful when examined separately by microenvironment.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancestral Native American Archaeology of the San Francisco Bay Area   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage