Women’s Time Allocation Trade-Offs in an Intensive Foraging Economy Led to Future Discounting Reproductive Behavior

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.

Population growth during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA) (1100–600 BP) and into the Late period (~600–180 BP) in Central California drove increased intensification and reliance on low-ranking, low-risk food sources, primarily acorn and small seeds inland, and shellfish and small schooling fish on the bay shore. These foods rely disproportionately on the labor input of women to gather and process. This focus on foods reliant on intensive female labor, combined with well-documented declines in reproductive-aged women’s foraging efficiency associated with the care of breastfeeding offspring, created high foraging opportunity costs for women. This time-allocation trade-off between foraging and direct parental investment may have incentivized earlier weaning ages during the Late period. A high risk of shortfall led to future-discounting reproductive behavior such that, in an effort provide sufficient foraging returns at the household level, women inadvertently decreased their inter-birth intervals and increased their fertility, producing greater strain on the household economy. Therefore, although high extrinsic mortality conditions associated with the MCA abated around 600 BP, the shift in life history strategies to a risk-averse quantity over quality approach during the MCA precipitated a cycle of population growth and intensification that extended into the Late period, driven by women’s time-allocation trade-offs.

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

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32552