The Ecology of Cooking with Firewood

Summary

Cooking food conferred an energetic advantage to our pre-human ancestors and became one of the hallmark characteristics of the human strategy set. Accessing fuel remains a common problem for many human societies. Yet anthropologists do not often take the costs of gathering fuel into account when modeling subsistence and settlement. This paper presents a model that incorporates firewood tradeoffs into human choices about what to eat and where to live, and examines a hypothetical case for the North American Great Basin. Applications of this model in both archaeological and modern ethnographic contexts will allow anthropologists and ecologists to illuminate firewood-mediated relationships between people and woodlands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20074