Now and Later: Defining Reliant and Redundant Food Storage Strategies Utilized by Hunter-Gatherers

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Research on storage in small-scale societies has, until recently, narrowly focused on determining the form and scale that food storage took, and its relatedness to increasing social complexity. This research, instead, looked at the purposeful decision-making behind the use of food storage as a risk management strategy in non-sedentary societies. Subterranean storage pits appear in the archaeological landscape of the northern Great Lakes after ca. AD 1000 and tribal communities continued to use them through the historic period. During the Terminal Late Woodland period (ca. AD 1000 -1600), subterranean food storage containers were systematically used by tribal communities with a spatially and seasonally restricted fisher-forager-horticulturalist subsistence system to create a stable food supply. Combining experimental archaeology, ethnographic and ethnohistoric data, along with archaeological data on food storage, this research examined the technology and behavioral patterns for use of subterranean food storage utilized by hunter-gatherer societies around the world. The collected data exhibited two prominent patterns for storage use, reliant and redundant. I argue that the northern lower Michigan Late Woodland people incorporated redundant food storage practices into their existing risk management strategies as a response to increased population and reduced territory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35902.0