Prehistoric Foraging Strategies In The Piute Valley Of Southern Nevada

Author : Carly Suzanne Whelan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781339825366
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (253 download)

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Download or read book Hunter-gatherer Storage and Settlement written by Carly Suzanne Whelan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite decades of research into hunter-gatherer storage, we have only a limited understanding of how hunter-gatherers decide which foods to store, and how settlement strategies can influence storage decisions. This dissertation addresses these questions with an examination of storage and settlement in the prehistoric central Sierra Nevada of California. Previous research in the region indicates that plant foods have been stored since at least the middle Holocene, and that storage preferences and settlement strategies have changed over time. To more thoroughly examine the region's record of settlement and storage, and explain why storage behavior changed, I investigated twelve prehistoric sites in the Lower Merced River drainage of northwest Mariposa County, and sourced nearly 5,000 obsidian artifacts from four museum collections. To reconstruct the record of settlement in the central Sierra Nevada of California, I analyze lithic reduction techniques and obsidian source distributions using the assemblages from 29 temporally discrete site components. The results suggest that residential mobility was high during the early Holocene, gradually decreased after 7,000 cal B.P., and reached its lowest point after 1,100 cal B.P.I then present a conceptual model for examining the decision of which foods to store, with a particular focus on the opportunity costs of storage. In the central Sierra Nevada, women performed the majority of storage tasks, and likely faced a tradeoff between foraging and providing childcare. An analysis of archaeobotanical data from the region indicates that fall-ripening nuts provided the staple of the storage diet, but that gray pine nuts decreased in importance while acorns increased in importance during the last 1,100 years. Though they have comparable post-encounter return rates, acorns can be collected and stored much more quickly than gray pine nuts, minimizing the time that women would need to spend foraging. The need to minimize foraging time may not have been pressing during the early and middle Holocene, when a residentially mobile settlement strategy allowed women to forage for short durations, close to the residential base. Increased sedentism after 1,100 cal B.P. likely forced women to make lengthier foraging excursions, making it more difficult for them to take children on foraging bouts. Women may have preferred to store acorns in this situation, since acorns would have allowed them to transfer their labor from foraging to food processing -- a task that is more compatible with childcare. This dissertation provides a framework for examining the storage behavior of hunter-gatherers, and demonstrates that storage decisions can affect and be affected by mobility strategies. It also finds that women's foraging strategies may deviate from the predictions made by optimal foraging models when the unique tradeoffs that women face are not considered. This has implications for the study of intensification and the shift from foraging to farming, as it suggests that intensive processing of low-ranking plant foods may reflect a reorganization of women's labor among competing tasks, rather than a shift to a less efficient economy.