Bayesian Multilevel Models of Diachronic Dietary Trajectories (DDTs) from 13,000 years of Great Plains Faunal Exploitation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Zooarchaeologists rely on long-term records of faunal remains to study significant diachronic changes in human-environmental interactions, including foraging-farming transitions, human-driven extinctions, animal translocations, and the development of complex societies. Here, we define the magnitude and direction of change observed in the zooarchaeological record over time as Diachronic Dietary Trajectories (DDTs). DDTs have been particularly valuable for their potential to empirically evaluate macro-temporal predictions derived from theory. Archaeologists frequently conduct Null Hypothesis Significance Testing to assess whether such apparent trends are meaningful patterns that support or refute theoretical predictions. However, the vagaries of archaeological preservation and sampling complicate constructing geographically and temporally accurate DDTs because of the incomplete archaeological record. Here, we use simulation and a sizeable empirical example of DDTs spanning 13,000 years of faunal exploitation by the people from the North American Great Plains. We show that Bayesian Multilevel Modeling (BMM) provides a framework to balance the drawbacks of the current methodologies and improve predictive power. Bayesian statistics thus provides a valuable framework for building comparisons of dietary proxies across regions and periods to understand the dynamics of DDTs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37242.0