What Can We Learn from Nearly 50 Years of Accumulated Data on the Kcal Return Rates Achieved by Hunters Encountering Terrestrial Game?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the mid-1970s the biologist D. Griffiths proposed that body size determines prey return rates and, citing the diet breadth model, D. S. Wilson stated that the lowest-ranked prey type harvested reveals the general efficiency of the foraging economy. Archaeologists, beginning with Bayham and Anderson, quickly made use of these proposals, initiating a now-large literature using faunal data to analyze resource intensification and its socioeconomic effects. Over the same period, archaeological and ethnographic measurements of resource rankings also have multiplied. Standardization and analysis of 217 of these return rate records from 181 prey types (Morin et al. 2021) reveals that body size generally is a weak predictor of return rates. However, more specific and narrowly defined predictions based on body fat, taxonomic grouping, latitude, hunting technology, and, in some instances, body size, along with multivariate analysis, using such variables can be reliable. These findings raise questions about large-game scenarios of hominin evolution, and how their impact on the intensification literature must be decided on a case-by-case basis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35788.0