All Kinds of Interesting Possibilities: Tracking the Division of Labor from the Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene in the American Southeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Far-Reaching Influence of Steven L. Kuhn" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Kuhn and Stiner (2006) argued that an overlooked, but salient difference between Neanderthals and modern humans was their approaches to dividing labor. Kuhn and Stiner contend that modern humans were “diverse specialists” that may have aided in their ability to adapt to novel and changing environments and outcompete generalists. Here, we adopt a similar approach to examine how people responded to changes in resource structure from the Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene in the American Southeast. We argue that warming temperatures and the expansion of oak/hickory forests created the context for gendered task specialization which prefaced the emergence of the Eastern Agricultural Complex.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• The Far-Reaching Influence of Steven L. Kuhn

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52678