Food, Conflict, and Mortality: Millennia-long Trends in the American Midcontinent

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There is nothing new about saying that the indigenous societies of the American midcontinent underwent significant changes during the several millennia prior to the arrival of Europeans. But lacking quantitative assessments of subsistence practices, intergroup conflict, and mortality patterns, among other topics, systematic evidence-based understandings of what took place and why it did so are greatly impoverished. Data assembled from numerous midcontinental sites clarify relationships among the intensification of subsistence practices (plant remains), differences in the intensity of intergroup conflict (human skeletons and defensive works), and changes in age-independent mortality (skeletons). During the Middle Woodland period two millennia ago, a time of impressive earthwork construction and the interregional exchange of symbolically charged objects, a stepwise shift in native plant cultivation accompanied declines in conflict and age-independent mortality. Less than a millennium later, and despite a further rapid shift to a heavy reliance on maize, both warfare and age-independent mortality increased. The mortality measure is an indication of the effect on communities of changes in ways of life, in this instance subsistence practices and intergroup relations. Assembling such information is a fitting tribute to David Anderson because it is precisely what he has done so often and well.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38673.0