Archaic Fishing in the Eastern Woodlands: An Examination of Social Causes and Environmental Variation

Summary

The Eastern Archaic Faunal Working Group brings together researchers and nearly sixty faunal datasets representing twenty-one sites from four major sub-regions of the Eastern Woodlands. In this paper, we focus on resource availability and the potential causal relationship to cultural choice. The Archaic Period archaeological sites in our study are located in the Mid-South and Ohio River Valley regions, and are well known for their composition of shell in the form of middens or mounds. In a previous analysis, Walker and Peres (2016) compared the use of aquatic resources between two sites located in the Mid-South region. The results indicated that while people at both sites focused on the exploitation of aquatic resources, there were significant differences in which species were targeted. The current research builds on this by integrating data sets from the Mid-South and Ohio River Valley regions using the data integration tools in tDAR. The aim of this study is to determine the spatial variability in aquatic resource use and correlate these patterns to cultural questions of broad concern: site function, dietary choice, and environmental variability.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Making Fauna Matter in Archaic Period Research: Exploring Adaptation, Population Growth, and Cultural Practice through the Digital Integration of Eastern Archaic Faunal Datasets   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16108