Resource Acquisition Risk as a Driver of Subsistence Transitions

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Explaining major subsistence transitions in human prehistory requires an evaluation of the costs and benefits past people experienced. All too often, these trade-offs are explored solely by analysis of central tendency (i.e., mean returns), without exploring the distribution of possible outcomes. Here we explore how acquisition risk, or variance in expected returns, is an equally (if not more) important factor to consider when examining past and present subsistence transitions. We model this using quantitative ethnographic data and simulated archaeological proxies to evaluate the role of resource acquisition risk as a driver of past subsistence transitions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33555