The Edible and Incredible Hare

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.

Zooarchaeological applications of the Prey Choice Model (PCM) are often based on the assumption that prey body-size is a robust proxy for prey rank and post-encounter return rate. In zooarchaeological assemblages, co-variation in the abundances of large and small-sized prey are often viewed as reflecting changes in foraging efficiency and are usually attributed to depressed encounter rates with large-sized and high ranked prey. But ethnographic and experimental studies show that hunting technology and techniques can greatly alter the efficiency and failure rates of hunting different prey. Using empirical data from several different ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources we show different hunting techniques used to procure leporids can be more reliable and productive than hunting certain large game. In the case of hares, noncaloric currencies such as sociopolitical gains and the thermal properties of hides may have also incentivized hunting these prey. We present archeological data from sites in the Bonneville Basin of western North America spanning the Holocene that show that leporids were more frequently targeted than larger-sized and presumably high ranked game, even when the latter were abundant on the landscape.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23272