What Makes a Forager Turn Coastal? An Agent-Based Approach to Coastal Foraging on the Dynamic South African Paleoscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Gram for gram, coastal shellfish have significant benefits over many terrestrial resources. They are higher in calories, fats, and proteins than most plants and are available in denser and more predictable patches than mammals. However, there are costs to foraging coastal shellfish. Foragers may have to travel significant distances to the coast or over-exploit terrestrial resources near the coastal strip. Further, coastal resources are temporally constrained on bi-weekly and daily tidal cycles. Human behavioural ecology (HBE) offers models to assess the caloric and time allocation trade-offs involved, but are insufficient to deal with the complexity of these spatially and temporally dynamic coastal-terrestrial foraging systems. Agent-based Models (ABMs) offer a powerful, underutilized method for building complex HBE models. We present an ABM of the "Paleoscape," a model of a South African coastal region, with agent foragers programmed with the logic of HBE. We model the spatial and temporal dynamics of this foraging system to understand the adaptive trade-offs of what makes a forager go coastal? We show that distance to the coast, costs of residential mobility, caloric returns of coastal vs. terrestrial resources, seasonality, population density, and anticipating tidal cycling all factor into the adaptiveness of a coastal foraging adaptation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24262