Did Increased Landscape Management through Pyrodiversity Lead to a Rise in Deer Procurement in the San Francisco Bay Area?

Summary

Some of the earliest archaeological applications of human behavioral ecology were Central California studies of faunal resource depression by Jack Broughton including a detailed study of the massive Emeryville Shellmound, located on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. An intriguing pattern identified by Broughton was a significant increase in the relative abundance of deer in the later occupational strata at Emeryville. Broughton attributed this shift to the initiation of distant-patch hunting and supported this attribution with body part representation data. Recent research along the Central California coast at Quiroste Valley has highlighted the role of native Californians in maintaining a diverse and highly productive mélange of habitats through controlled burning. We seek to examine whether there is a faunal signature that provides evidence for similar burning in the San Francisco Bay Area and if so, whether this might provide a complementary explanation to Broughton’s distant-patch foraging. We hypothesize that controlled burning of the hills adjacent to the Emeryville Shellmound would have enhanced habitat in a manner that increased deer populations and also made deer more regular targets for hunters from Emeryville. Finally, we discuss the broader implications of landscape management on prehistoric foraging in Central California.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Ancient California: Reconstructing Lifeways with Behavioral Ecology Models

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17128