Using Food Web Models to Examine Desert Networks in the American Southwest and Western Australia

Summary

Archaeological studies benefit from rich ecological data, yet linking ecological data to narratives of the past can be difficult. Here I use trophic network modeling to understand both Ancestral Pueblo and Australian Aboriginal food webs, comparing these systems for a greater understanding of human and environmental resilience. Here I show that Ancestral Pueblo people connected themselves into a greater environmental web and use network analysis to examine how the changing network properties of the Ancestral Pueblo food web led to vulnerabilities of the web to environmental stochasticity and anthropogenic change. I then calibrate the results from this study to ethnographic data recently gathered among remote living Aboriginal people in the Western Desert of Australia. I show how food web modeling can help us understand the cascading extinctions of small mammals following the removal of Aboriginal people to outstations in the 1960s. The utility of food web modeling for understanding the ethnographic dataset can then be extrapolated to the Pueblo dataset, indicating where and when the Ancestral Pueblo people became most vulnerable to environmental change. Ultimately I demonstrate that an unstable food web led to decreased resilience of the Pueblo people, forcing migration.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21522