Investigating alternative subsistence strategies among homeless individuals in University, Hillsborough County, Florida

Summary

Homelessness is one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time. At least 570,000 people in the United States currently experience homelessness, and at least 175,000 of these live in unsheltered locations, which implies both exposure to weather and inadequate access to drinking water and sanitation resources. Most rehabilitation programs focus on returning such individuals to "normal" productive society, but research shows that many have abandoned wage labor and are instead pursuing urban foraging as a subsistence strategy. Therefore, in order to better understand contemporary homelessness and inform programs and policies, combined archaeological and ethnographic studies of material culture and foraging patterns among the urban homeless are necessary. This paper contains the results of research on this subject, focusing on a small area of Hillsborough County, Florida, that contains a high rate of homelessness. The question that drives this research is: how do homeless individuals survive using alternative subsistence strategies? The researcher used both archaeological surface survey of camp sites and participant mapping to provide answers to this question.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage