The Prevalence of Entomophagy in the Americas: A Meta-analysis of Human Coprolites

Summary

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

Ethnography demonstrates entomophagy, or consumption of insects, to be a relatively common practice around the world. Despite such prevalence, insect foods are discussed rarely in the archaeological literature, presumably due to Western biases, which may acknowledge the presence of edible insects but refrains from considering them a viable food resource. To evaluate the extent to which past Indigenous communities of the Americas consumed insects, we conduct a literature-based meta-analysis of human coprolites. The analysis identifies over 9,150 specimens from 52 archaeological sites, comprising 57 distinct assemblages that span up to 14 millennia. Thirty-two percent of the assemblages contain one or more human coprolites with intentionally consumed edible insects, indicating that almost a third of past subsistence economies of the Americas incorporated insects into their diets. The samples containing edible insects also demonstrate that four percent of the average diet consisted of insects. These results reveal that insects were a common part of early subsistence economies in the Americas and were unlikely to have been the starvation food many Western scholars often assume.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37922.0