Paleoindian Shellfishing and Feminist Agency at Quebrada Jaguay-280

Summary

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

Occupants of the southern Peruvian site of Quebrada Jaguay 280 (QJ-280) maintained consistent preferential resource procurement practices for 4,000 history, from ~12,000-8,000 cal yr BP. Site deposits demonstrated that hunter-gatherers focused on capturing two fish species and one mollusk, Mesodesma donacium. Such intense specificity conflicts with behavioral ecology, and optimal foraging theory as this practice requires considerable time and rejection of numerous other species. Similar procurement patterns have been demonstrated by the Anbarra women of Australia. Anbarra women leave their beaches and travel hours to another to collect one specific shellfish despite locally having access to dozens other. Ethnographies report they make the journey both for the shellfish and to have alone time from men.

Innumerable ethnographies demonstrate that shellfishing has largely been performed by women. Women have had the chance to freely socialize with other women away from a male gaze. If men were fishing, women would have been left alone to wander the beaches for hours for shellfishing, as seen in the Anbarra case. As there are no other documented contemporary cases with similarly low diversity deposits, QJ-280 may have been associated by early hunter-gatherer women as a space in which they had pronounced agency and freedom.

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): 36713.0