Disentangling the demographic consequences of subsistence stress and parasite epidemiology among the ancestral Alutiit of the Kodiak Archipelago

Summary

Ecological and biodemographic perspectives on human population history emphasize changes in health and disease as key drivers of macrodemographic change. However, the approaches that demographers and archaeologists have taken to modeling the epidemiologic and demographic sequelae of food insecurity on one hand and infectious disease on the other differ in several noteworthy respects: Models addressing subsistence sufficiency and stress have tended to accommodate frequent changes in food security, driven by both environmental change and subsistence-economic reorganization, often following regionally unique trajectories. Conversely, models addressing our species’s history of infectious disease largely conform to a coarse-grained and globally generic typological account, focusing primarily on the demographic consequences of Neolithic and modern Epidemiologic Transitions. This paper presents an attempt to sync up the spatiotemporal scales of food- and infectious disease-focused population modeling, using a case study from the Kodiak Archipelago in the Gulf of Alaska. I present preliminary results of a time series analysis combining archaeological temporal frequency data with the GISP2-based paleotemperature record and time series data on regional salmon population dynamics and archaeofaunal abundances, as well as incoming archaeoparasitological data.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16522