Small Carnivore Use in the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic of Kephalari Cave (Peloponnese, Greece): Opportunistic or Optimal?

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.

The Late Pleistocene of southern Greece adheres to many predictions set forth by human behavioral ecology concerning the use of small game in the face of demographic growth, ecological change, and advancements in procurement technologies. In Peloponnese, an increase in small, fast game use accompanied the transition to the Upper Paleolithic. The trend intensified through the Upper Paleolithic, culminating in the use of aquatic species by the Mesolithic. A less well-explored aspect of this shift is the use of small carnivores. Researchers have documented small carnivore species, specifically fox, lynx, martin, badger, and wild cat, at several sites in southern Greece. These taxa are always present, though their economic importance and ubiquity relative to their environmental abundance are not always clear. In this paper, I discuss the use of small carnivores in the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic of Kephalari Cave in Peloponnese. I focus in particular on taphonomic evidence that humans exploited the taxa for meat in addition to fur, and explore whether or not their abundance changed throughout the phases of site occupation. In doing so, I discuss the extent to which models from HBE are useful in interpreting rare species that might have importance beyond the subsistence pursuit.

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): 24125