The Ideal Free Distribution, Population Packing, and the Forager to Producer Transition in the Southern Levant

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Using predictions derived from the ideal free distribution, we test the hypothesis that the forager to farmer transition in the southern Levant emerged from a context of increased population packing. By constructing population size estimates derived from radiocarbon date frequencies and modeling changes in occupied site suitability through time, we estimate human population density in ecological zones of varying quality. We then compare the population densities in these zones with zooarchaeological relative taxonomic abundance data estimates of foraging efficiency. An inverse relationship between human population and foraging efficiency suggests that the adoption of agriculture was related to population packing rather than the motivation to settle down in "affluent habitats."

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25546