Risky Business? Prey Choice in Pleistocene and Holocene Northern Australia

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.

Although archaeofaunal assemblages from northern Australia are limited, records indicate an early adoption of "broad-spectrum" diets. Inland, key prey items consist of small- to medium-sized mammals and reptiles, with large kangaroos being exploited less frequently. On the coast, shellfish, fish and marine turtles are featured alongside smaller-sized terrestrial prey. Published ethnographic data from the Western Desert has previously noted that prey size does not adequately predict rank, and that pursuit costs appear to play a more important role. Large kangaroos, for example, were viewed as a particularly risky enterprise, especially when suitable technology for capture had been left at home. In this paper, I examine new data from Pleistocene and Holocene faunal assemblages from northern Australia, and explore how animal behaviour may have affected prey rank.

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): 24063