Climate Change and the Foraging-Farming Transition on the Great Plains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The foraging lifestyle persisted as the major human subsistence strategy worldwide for most of the human career. With notable exceptions, this way of life was eventually replaced by a subsistence base complemented and often dominated by cultivated foods. Archaeologists have proposed several hypotheses to explain this foraging-farming transition. One hypothesis is that climatically induced decreases in foraging risk might have functioned as a causal factor underlying this transition. However, the effects of climate change on the foraging risk of prehistoric populations are difficult to operationalize and evaluate. This study provides a methodology to test the hypothesis that climate change had an effect on increased foraging risk and was a causal factor of a foraging-farming transition. To evaluate this hypothesis, we use a sample of nearly 2,500 archaeological components from the North American Great Plains, where the widespread adoption of cultigens increased during the Plains Woodland period (2500-1150 BP). Using distribution models of prey-species, archaeological diet data, and paleoenvironmental proxies, this study reconstructs the paleoenvironment, assesses the availability of prehistoric resources, and compares expected to observed diets. Results of this research allow for a better understanding of the effects of climate change on the foraging strategies of Great Plains populations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25237