The Problem of Geographic Circumscription, Population Aggregation, and Ideal Free Distribution on Isla Cedros, Baja California, Mexico

Summary

In the last half-century, studies using human behavioral ecology (HBE) have made significant headway in modeling how humans in the past would have adapted to the environmental constraints surrounding them. There has been much less progress in terms of examining the socio-political pressures hunter-gatherers in the past would have felt in their daily lives. Factors driving choices in these models are often based on an underlying assumption of ideal free distribution; however, one is hard-pressed to find an example where social and political pressures failed to influence peoples’ choices in the past. This paper aims to employ HBE concepts within a specific historical framework in order to explore how social structure and demographics might have affected the inhabitants of Isla Cedros during the late Pleistocene as compared to Montero (AD 400-600) and Huamalgüeño phase (AD ~1150-1732) sites across the landscape. This diachronic approach uses Cedros as a case study in order to showcase the ways in which socio-political constraints may outweigh ecological incentives. By incorporating a historically contingent and geographically specific context to models of past human behavior, this paper seeks to further our ability to understand the dynamic and reciprocal relationships between societies and their natural and physical environments.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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