Are Mountains Marginal?

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.

Mountain environments, the treeless parts above 10,000 ft specifically, are traditionally viewed as less productive, more difficult of access, more physiologically challenging, and for those reasons, marginal to their subalpine counterparts. The ideal free distribution (IFD) of Fretwell and Lucas (1969) provides a means of testing this “marginal mountain” hypothesis in eastern California, casting the White Mountains alpine zone against subalpine environments of Owens Valley. IFD holds that patches vary in initial user fitness, user fitness declining as the number of patch users increases. Patches conferring highest fitness are used first, then by successively more users, eventually prompting use of the patch conferring the next highest initial user fitness. Thus, use of marginal patches lags use of patches conferring higher initial user fitness. The White Mountains alpine zone is not marginal in this sense. Time-sensitive projectile point distributions show no alpine lag, indeed near contemporaneous initial use and trajectories of overall change in the White Mountain alpine and Owens Valley subalpine zones, likely reflecting the seasonal abundance of Bighorn sheep in the alpine zone. Alpine and subalpine both show near-identical lags in residential relative to overall use, both reflecting the regional shift to residentially staged hunting.

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): 52926