Modeling White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) Responses to Human Population Change and Ecosystem Engineering in Precolonial and Colonial Eastern North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

White-tailed deer were an important resource for both Native peoples and European colonists in precolonial and early colonial North America. Yet, evidence for possible overexploitation of deer prior to European colonization remains inconclusive. Some have argued that the species was resilient to human predation due in part to anthropogenic fire, which creates the ecologically disturbed habitat preferred by white-tailed deer. Nonetheless, deer populations declined to near extinction by 1900. Here, I develop an agent-based model to investigate how ecosystem engineering in the form of controlled burning could counteract human hunting pressure to promote deer abundance. This model permits exploration of whether human population growth could counterintuitively increase deer abundance via ecosystem engineering, how high a human population must be to depress a deer population, and how human population growth and decline relates to changes in the frequency and scale of ecosystem engineering.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38052.0