A Zooarchaeological Application of Adaptive Cycling and Risk Mitigation at Tell el-Hesi, Israel

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Human societies do not operate as a stagnated phenomenon but instead experience stacked cycles of adaptation, resilience, and possibly collapse. Identifying and teasing these cycles in the archaeological record can be difficult and have often been applied to hunter-gatherer case studies. This research attempts to apply an adaptive cycling model to Tell el-Hesi, an early urban locale in the Southern Levant, to identify periods of adaptation and resiliency. The site is characterized by rapid development, a series of prolonged occupations during the height of the Early Bronze Age II–III (3050–2300 BCE), and rapid collapse. Faunal remains from the Early Bronze Age occupation at the site are selected as the mode of analysis and are used as an indicator of potential adaptive cycles. Faunal remains are entwined with prehistoric economy and are an excellent reflection of adaptive cycling. The results of this case study suggest that changes in occupants’ diet breadth occurred across different occupational layers with an increase in diet breadth prior to collapse at Tell el-Hesi, demonstrating the potential for the use of faunal remains to identify small scales of adaptive cycling operating at an early urban locale in the Southern Levant.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37702.0