Ecosystem Control and Costly Signaling: An Integrated Analysis of Holocene Hunting in the Bonniville and Wyoming Basins, USU

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We explore and integrate different currencies that may underlie large-game hunting to guide a trans-Holocene analysis of variation in artiodactyl utilization using archaeofaunal data-sets from predominantly open-air sites from the Bonneville and Wyoming basins. The available empirical data continue to suggest that artiodactyls yield consistently higher return rates than lagomorphs allowing us to leverage predictions from both the prey choice and energetic risk-gain models that the relative importance of artiodactyl hunting should scale closely with climate-based change in their abundance on the landscape. We document with modeled climate data that seasonal variables correlated with the relative frequency of artiodactyl hunting, but that summer temperature had a significant overriding effect in both regions. Controlling for the negative relationship between summer temperature and artiodactyl abundances, we then document enhanced artiodactyl hunting in general and bison more specifically during both the Fremont period in Utah and the Middle Holocene Housepit phenomenon in SW Wyoming. These results are consistent with a costly signaling hypothesis and the unique socio-ecological conditions of these contexts. Thus, climatic variation and its influence on artiodactyl abundances drives the overall trajectory of Holocene large game hunting variation but measurable and more subtle influences of costly signaling are also detected.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *Behavioral Ecology in the Mountain West   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51857