Shellfishery Management and the Socioecology of Community-Based Sustainability

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How do human settlements grow sustainably? What is the capacity of both our institutions and our local ecologies to mediate the pressures of demographic growth? Nowhere are these questions and challenges more critical today than in coastal zones, where populations grow exponentially. For millennia, Indigenous populations across the globe have navigated the complexities and sensitivities of estuarine ecosystems, leaving robust archaeological records of long-term, adaptive histories. This study seeks to understand how the management of public goods, specifically shellfish, and the organization of key social institutions may have changed over time on the Georgia Coast (USA), ca. 500–1,000 years ago, as densely populated towns grew. More specifically, we investigate the growth of one of the largest Ancestral Muskogean towns to have existed along the Atlantic Coast, on Ossabaw Island, and the ways shellfisheries were collectively managed in the face of growing demographic pressures on both local ecologies and social, political, and economic institutions. To do so, we employ a shellfish dataset from 23 sampled household shell middens across a single town to evaluate the kinds of pressures that population growth may have had on shellfish resources and how people organized access and use-rights to these resources across households.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Property Regimes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37984.0