The Strength of Deep Ties: Obsidian Provenance Suggests Long-Distance Cooperation over Six Millennia in Numu Territory

Summary

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

Scholars have suggested that economies of scale gained from cooperative hunting fueled the evolution of human sociality. This model anticipates inflated levels of cooperation during group-hunting events in comparison to other contexts. To evaluate this prediction, we examine the provenance of 395 obsidian projectile points from the large communal hunting complex of Tunna’ Nosi’ Kaiva’ Gwaa in Numu (Northern Paiute) territory, Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Nevada. Consistent with the model, we observe evidence of long-distance interaction extending up to 100 km and spanning six millennia. Inconsistent with the model, we observe that the level of interaction at the TNKG communal hunting complex was no greater than levels observed at other site types. Numu world views offer a parsimonious explanation in which routine cooperative interactions were embedded in systems of generalized reciprocity that have always connected the Numu in expansive social networks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36826.0