Why Pursue Fish in Small Quantities? The Case of Ancestral Puebloan Fishing in the PIV Middle Rio Grande

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In prehispanic central New Mexico, small numbers of disarticulated fish remains—such as catfish, sucker, and gar—are frequently recovered from Pueblo IV (AD 1350–1600) sites in the Middle Rio Grande basin, but they are rare during earlier agricultural time periods. Increased aquatic habitat quality brought on by the end of the Medieval Warm period could have impacted the foraging goals of energy maximization and risk minimization for Ancestral Puebloans in the region. The energy obtained by Ancestral Puebloan fishers could have been maximized because fishes provided more calories due to increased fish body size. In addition, fishes could have been more successfully harvested per fishing episode, making fishing less risky, because the stability of fish communities was greater than it was previously. However, the intersection of risk minimization and energy maximization foraging strategies regarding Pueblo IV fishing is speculative and should be tested. Here, I estimate the body size of Middle Rio Grande fishes and analyze the stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes of fish bones recovered from archaeological sites in the region to begin to tackle this problem.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24879