Despotism in the Southern Sierra Nevada: Linking Habitat Distribution and Tubatulabal Territorial Behavior

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.

Fifty years after their introduction, ideal distribution models have recently contributed to our understanding of numerous behavioral processes. In this paper, I argue these models hold the potential to increase our understanding of a broader suite of behaviors including, but not limited to, territoriality. Territorial and competitive behaviors are fundamental components of the ideal despotic distribution and have often been overlooked in discussions of such spatial patterns. Here, I present an ideal distribution model for the Tubatulabal of the far southern Sierra Nevada, California in an effort to link habitat distribution and territorial behavior among low population density foragers. Though such behaviors are often viewed as an active process, passive territorial and competitive behaviors should be reflected in the distribution and land-use patterns of a population, which can elucidate the processes behind territorial formation and maintenance through time. Tubatulabal territory provides a unique opportunity to assess these hypotheses as they are the long-term occupants of the far southern Sierra Nevada and maintained their territory through contact despite dramatic demographic shifts and the emplacement of larger population density groups with more complex sociopolitical organization in adjacent territories throughout the late Holocene.

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): 24312