Between Party Lines: A Bipartisan Reevaluation of the Early Paleoindian Zooarchaeological Record

Summary

The debate regarding early Paleoindians as megafaunal specialists or subsistence generalists has had a long and contentious history in Americanist archaeology. A quantitative reanalysis of the early Paleoindian zooarchaeological record in the continental United States is presented. Previous analyses of the faunal record focused only on taxonomic richness and have not utilized other measurements of taxonomic diversity. My analyses of the faunal record include measurements of taxonomic richness, evenness and heterogeneity. Evenness and heterogeneity indices of fauna are also based on body size class. Indices are calculated based on two different methodologies used by previous authors. The first is a conservative method that includes only fauna with strong evidence of subsistence use while the other is a liberal method that includes all fauna found on an early Paleoindian sites. Analyses produce results that are opposite of what the original authors concluded with the conservative method indicating that the early Paleoindians were megafaunal specialists while the liberal method indicates the early Paleoindains were subsistence generalists. This poses more questions regarding early Paleoindian subsistence patterns and poses implications of what faunal remains can tell archaeologists about prehistoric human diets.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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