Contact, Colonists, and Common Pool Resources: Insights from SIA of Terrestrial Fauna from North Carolina Coast and Interior in the Little Ice Age

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Stable Isotope Analysis in Global History" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In recent years, human skeletons have become less accessible to bioarchaeologists aiming to understand past lifeways through destructive chemical analyses—despite these methods being more affordable, accessible, and well-established than ever in the biological, social, and life sciences. Human skeletons provide the most direct evidence of how human health, mortality, morbidity, well-being, and social conflict responded to period of climate change and common pool resource depletion. Since this knowledge is more critical than ever to understanding humanity’s successes and failures in the face of our current challenges, we must continue to push the bounds of theoretical and analytical frameworks that can illuminate the impact of shock events in human food ecology beyond the limits of bioarchaeology.

This paper combines stable isotope analysis of AMS-dated deer, racoon, pig, and dog bone (as proxies for human diet and subsistence) with deer fracture patterns (arrow vs. gunshot) to compare differences in agriculture and hunting between inland, Moravian settled Cherokee lands and coastal, English settled Algonquin lands during the Little Ice Age (LIA, ~1580-1850’s CE). Results suggest that maize agriculture decreased and hunting intensified in the coast but were unchanged in the Yadkin River Valley, perhaps related to differences in colonial-Indigenous relationships and landscape morality.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Stable Isotope Analysis in Global History

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51115