Evaluation of the Village Ecodynamics hunting and domestication models

Summary

The Village Ecodynamics Project simulation ("Village") incorporates paleoenvironmental and archaeological data to understand the human and environmental interactions that occurred during the Ancestral Pueblo occupation of portions of the Colorado Plateau of the US Southwest. Village predicts the available populations of deer, jackrabbits, and cottontails across the simulated landscape—as well as the sample of those fauna hunted by households—and how these vary with such parameters as household protein requirements and hunting radius. When turkey domestication is implemented, Village predicts protein yield from maize-fed turkey. Previous evaluations of these hunting and domestication models have explored system-level patterns of population density and settlement in the archaeological record. In this study, we evaluate the goodness-of-fit between animal-use predictions from the simulation and zooarchaeological data from sites located on the simulated landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage