Selfish for Shellfish, or Magnanimous about Mollusks? The Transformation of Cooperation across the First Millennium CE at Crystal River and Roberts Island, Florida, USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Blanton and Fargher (2016) critique evolutionary theorists for the assumption that cooperation was a single evolutionary hurdle; even if our species overcame such an obstacle in our distant evolutionary development, it is simplistic to assume that cooperation and collective action have been unchanged around the world over the last 100,000 or more years. Too little attention has been devoted to how cooperation and collective action may change under particular ecological and historical circumstances. Recent research at the Crystal River and Roberts Island sites, on the Gulf Coast of peninsular Florida, suggests changes in the scale and intensity of cooperation in subsistence production over the first millennium CE, as reflected in faunal remains (including oxygen isotope studies of shellfish) and subsistence technology. Specifically, in early phases, the scale of cooperation may have been broad in terms of the number of people or productive groups integrated, but the intensity of cooperation in subsistence endeavors was probably relatively limited. Later, there appears to have been a reduction in the social scale of cooperation, but productive groups began cooperating more intensively.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23213