Geographic Variation in White-Tailed Deer Abundance in Precolonial Southern New England

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Across eastern North America, white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) were a key food resource in the diets of Native peoples. Despite heavy predation by sizeable Native American populations, there is only limited evidence that white-tailed deer were ever unsustainably hunted prior to European colonization. After colonization, however, people drove deer nearly to extinction in just a few centuries. To investigate whether deer populations were depressed by Native hunters in southern New England, and to better establish a pre-colonial demographic baseline for the species, I compiled a dataset of white-tailed deer remains from published archaeological reports. Using faunal records from eight sites across southern New England, I investigate pre-colonial abundances of white-tailed deer during the Late Woodland period and assess spatial variation in their presence across the region. There are significant differences in deer abundance between upland, river valley, and coastal sites. Deer are most common in the former two habitat types, but their relatively lower representation in coastal sites may reflect patch choice dynamics, not resource depression. Thus the question of whether white-tailed deer were depressed by Native hunters prior to European colonization remains open.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53363