Refining Ecological Contexts of Animal Herding: Implications for Culture Process

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Previous research that derived expectations from hunter-gatherer macroecology demonstrates that the combination of effective temperature zones and setting near coastlines or very large interior lakes display distinct patterns of resource intensification. These patterns allow researchers to predict the environmental zones of early plant and animal domestication and compare these expectations with archaeological site distributions. For plant domestication, the archaeological pattern is largely as expected, but it is clear that these variables alone are not sufficient to anticipate the timing/ location of animal domestication. This comparative study seeks to refine our understanding of the environmental factors contributing to early animal domestication using geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial statistics to analyze measures of seasonality of plant growth, and other important variables while identifying regional and temporal patterns that may signal a shift in subsistence strategy to animal domestication. Clarifying which seasonality measures are most associated with the locales of early animal domestication will provide additional valuable insights for the development of formal models of relationships between innovation and population dynamics across multiple types of ecosystems.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39568.0