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Plots and model fits summarizing results from the four main predictions. (a, P1) Number of site occupants as a function of site size ( ). (b, P2) Duration of active site occupation as a function of size sorting. (c, P3) Median monitor lizard harvest (kcals) as a function of site size and (d, P4) as a function of size sorting. Confidence intervals show the standard error (95%) of the model fit. See Table 1 for details.
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Archaeological investigations of hunter-gatherer site structure have remained largely descriptive, despite significant explanatory advancements by evolutionary approaches to foraging behavior and ecology. To date, calls to incorporate site structure studies within this behavioral ecological framework have largely been ignored. We suggest there is a...
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Context 1
... of more time spent a the site, then the duration of occupation should increase with degree of size sorting. Across the ten sites for which size sorting data was available, the active occupation time and the sum time spent hunt- ing monitor lizards increases as a function of the difference in disper- sion between large and small bone fragments (Fig. 5b). While overall the models are a significant improvement over a null model, the ef- fect of each independent variable is not statistically significant (Table 1). These findings suggest that size sorting may be a rough proxy for the amount of time individuals spend at a site and the amount of time spent foraging, but that the effect may ...
Context 2
... on theoretical insights from the MVT, more people, occupy- ing larger sites, should cause greater in-patch competition and result in lower per capita yields. The results show that this generally holds true: monitor lizard harvests decline as site size increases (Fig. 5c). But the effect is only significant inasmuch as the inclusion of site size improves the prediction of monitor lizard returns when compared to a null model ( ), with any independent effects of site size likely due to chance (Table 1). Moreover, this is not a very robust as- sociation, with site size explaining only 10% of deviance in ...
Context 3
... should stay longer in higher quality patches, which should result in greater size sorting and higher per capita returns. The data support this prediction, showing that mean and median harvests increase with the degree of size sorting (Fig. 5d). Size sorting explains 28% of the deviance in median monitor lizard harvest and 38% in mean harvest. Though while the inclusion of the independent variable improves each model significantly , the effect of each in- dependent variable is only marginally significant ( ; Table 1). Overall, these findings roughly support the predictions, ...
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... As an example of the predictive utility of this model, we first turn to an ethnographic case drawing on quantitative foraging data collected by the authors in collaboration with Martu, an Australian Aboriginal population who live in and have Native Title over their ancestral estates in Western Australia (Fig. 6.2) , 2010Bird et al., , 2009Bird et al., , 2013Bird et al., , 2016a, 2012aCodding et al., 2010Codding et al., , 2011Codding et al., , 2014Codding et al., , 2016aScelza et al., 2014;Scelza & Bliege Bird, 2008; Zeanah et al., 2015Zeanah et al., , 2017. We then briefly contrast these patterns with those reported by Jim O'Connell and Kristen Hawkes (1981Hawkes ( , 1984 who worked with Alyawarre populations in Central Australia (Fig. 6.2). ...
... Whether through formal architecture or the patterned use of space, at landscape or domestic scales, such structuring is ubiquitous among people past and present, from hunter-gatherers to members of complex societies (e.g. Otte 2012; Codding et al. 2016;Maher & Conkey 2019). Identifying spatial structuring in archaeological contexts, however, can be difficult, particularly when studying hunter-gatherer sites. ...
Documenting the intentional structuring of space by hunter-gatherers can be challenging, especially in complex cave contexts. One approach is the spatial analysis of discard patterns. Here, the authors consider the spatial distribution of faunal remains from the Lower Magdalenian Level 115 in El Mirón Cave, Cantabria, to assess a possible structuring function for an unusual alignment of rocks. Although it is impossible to determine whether the alignment was intentionally constructed, differences in the distributions of taxa and in specimen sizes on different sides of this feature suggest that it played a role in structuring the living space of the cave's inhabitants.
... The benefits the group will get if they move to a new place influence decisions to move from one place to another (Kelly, 1992). Within a human behavioral ecology framework, the Marginal Value Theorem (Charnov, 1976) has been widely used in hunter-gatherers' archaeology to evaluate human decisions about mobility (Winterhalder, 2001;Bettinger and Grote, 2016;Codding et al., 2016;Venkataraman et al., 2017). This model predicts the optimal time to abandon a patch of resources. ...
In this paper, we focus on the results of the archaeological research in the Diamante Valley, the southernmost limit of the expansion of agriculture, sedentary societies, and the Inka empire (Fig. 1). We conducted the first fieldwork in this area involving random surface sampling, followed by test pits in open-air sites. Our analyses
show changes in the settlement pattern of hunter-gatherer societies. During the first part of the Late Holocene (3000–1500 years BP), hunter-gatherers used the highlands and the piedmont seasonally. The archaeological evidence suggests a context of resource abundance and frequent movements from one patch of resources to the other in both biogeographic units. During the last part of the Late Holocene (post-1500 BP period), the increased demography made hunter-gatherers stay longer in each patch. In this later period, we observe a settlement pattern that combines, on the one hand, short-term particular tasks camps with shallow anthropogenic deposits, low artifactual density, richness, and diversity, and on the other hand, larger residential base camps with deep deposits, high artifactual density, richness, and diversity. We also find differences in how hunter-gatherers use
the two biogeographic units. We find short-term non-residential camps and larger residential camps in the piedmont. Here we found versatile toolkits with abundant cores and cortex. Even though basalts are abundant in the highlands, there is a more significant amount of non-local raw materials, such as obsidians. Projectile points
and scrapers dominate the assemblages, which might lead to task-specific activities such as hunting and processing guanacos. From these results, we can affirm that Late Holocene hunter-gatherer groups from Diamante Valley had an excellent knowledge of the landscape and took advantage of the different altitudinal gradients’
different resources with an organized settlement pattern.
... Occupations of longer duration often result in areas of primary use containing mostly small debris and secondary dumping areas with primarily larger artifacts (Hitchcock 1987;Metcalf and Heath 1990;O'Connell 1987O'Connell , 1993. Codding et al. (2016) also validate that the greater the size sorting of remains the longer the site occupation with data from their studies of the Martu, part time foragers in western Australia. ...
The massive literature on hunter-gatherer intensification usually considers population increase, environmental productivity, or technological innovation as its major drivers, though researchers disagree on which initiates the process. The examination of the Late Holocene Uinta phase of the southern Wyoming Basin documents the intensification process and the relationship of technological innovation, population increase, and environmental change. The introduction and complete adoption of the bow and arrow from 1800 to 1500 cal BP coincides with the sharp increase of radiocarbon dates and population growth, as well as climatic change from Neoglacial cooling to warmer and wetter conditions. Of these factors, the introduction of a significant new technology appears to have been the initial force in the process. The intensification process resulted in the Late Holocene population reducing their foraging efficiency to include low return-rate seeds of weedy species leading to the possible privatization of some resources and the transformation of their adaptive strategy to a delayed-return system that incorporated storage, reduction of residential mobility, and a longer-term occupation of certain locations.
... If ethnographic patterns of land use were in place, we predict that many of these large areas would have been rarely utilized or perhaps some were purposefully avoided due to known deficiencies in the resource energy base 12 . This proposition is readily testable because it predicts that archaeological sites with poorly sorted, low densities of artefacts will be found in these places 12 . Defining the appropriate scale will be the key to testing our model, since we have demonstrated that broad biogeographic units are heterogenous and yet at a fine-grained scale, small areas of low suitability, which are often a local geographic feature (e.g., sand dune, bare rock outcrop, or erosional area), need not have been obstacles. ...
Modern satellite imaging offers radical new insights of the challenges and opportunities confronting traditional Aboriginal ecology and land use in Australia’s Western Desert. We model the likely dynamics of historic and precontact desert land use using Earth observation data to identify the distribution of suitable foraging habitats. Suitability was modelled for an ideal environmental scenario, based on satellite observations of maximal water abundance, vegetation greenness, and terrain ruggedness. Our model shows that the highest-ranked foraging habitats do not align with land systems or bioregions that have been used in previous reconstructions of Australian prehistory. We identify impoverished desert areas where unsuitable foraging conditions have likely persisted since early in the last glacial cycle, and in which occupation would always have been rare. These findings lead us to reconsider past patterns of land use and the predicted archaeological signature of earlier desert peoples.
... Marginal utility models from economics have seen successful use in behavioral studies to explore decision-making processes when there are diminishing returns to investment (Bettinger and Grote 2016;Calcagno et al. 2014;Charnov 1976;Charnov and Parker 1995;Codding et al. 2016;Parker et al. 2019;Venkataraman et al. 2017). ...
Despite decades of research, we still lack a clear explanation for the emergence and persistence of inequality. Here we propose and evaluate a marginal utility of inequality hypothesis that nominates circumscription and environmental heterogeneity as independent, necessary conditions for the emergence of intragroup material inequality. After coupling the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) with newly generated data from remote sensing, we test predictions derived from this hypothesis using a multivariate generalized additive model that accounts for spatial and historical dependence as well as subsistence mode. Our analyses show that the probability a society will be stratified increases significantly as a function of proxies of environmental heterogeneity and environmental circumscription. This supports the hypothesis that increasing environmental heterogeneity and circumscription drives the emergence and persistence of inequality among documented societies across the globe. We demonstrate how environmental heterogeneity and circumscription produce situations that limit individuals’ options so that some may find it in their best interest to give up some autonomy for material gain, while others may find it in their best interest to give up some material resources for another individual’s time or deference. These results support the marginal utility of inequality framework and enable future explorations of the ecological conditions that facilitate the emergence of intragroup inequality through time and across the globe.
... Occupations of longer duration often result in areas of primary use containing mostly small debris and secondary dumping areas with primarily larger artifacts (Hitchcock 1987;Metcalf and Heath 1990;O'Connell 1987O'Connell , 1993. Codding et al. (2016) also validate that the greater the size sorting of remains the longer the site occupation with data from their studies of the Martu, part time foragers in western Australia. ...
The classification of hunter-gatherer societies as immediate-return or delayed-return offers a framework to explore variation in their adaptive strategies. Immediate-return societies would have evidence of limited food storage, sharing of resources, and high residential mobility. Archaeological attributes of an immediate-return society include the absence of formal storage facilities, artifact refits among dwellings indicating the sharing of resources, circular dwellings of small diameter, closely spaced dwellings, low density of artifacts without middens, low diversity of tools, generalized tools, and bifacial tools. The Elk Head site in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming provides an excellent opportunity to test the hypothesis that the site represents an immediate-return system. The results indicate that households at the site followed a variation of an immediate return adaptive strategy. The site inhabitants constructed basin dwellings in anticipation of later reuse and probably baked geophytes, mostly for immediate consumption as an adaptation to the dry mid-Holocene climate.
... Increasingly, it has become a focus in archaeology to understand the discussed processes as functions of human-non-human cohabitation and coevolution beyond the culture-nature dualism rooted in Western scientific traditions and deciphering the associated economic, ecologic and social practices (cf. Bird and O'Connell, 2006;Brittain and Overton, 2013;Codding et al., 2016;Fitzhugh et al., 2018;Pilaar Birch, 2018;Rowley-Conwy and Layton, 2011;Stewart et al., 2004;Wieckowska-Lüth et al., 2018;Zeder, 2015). As many hunter-gatherer practices are embedded within a culturally and spiritually charged environment, they can at best be partially grasped by archaeological methods (e.g. ...
Like any other living being, humans constantly influence their environment, be it intentionally or unintentionally. By extracting natural resources, they shape their environment and also that of plants and other animals. A great difference setting people apart from all other living beings is the ability to construct and develop their own niche intentionally, and the unique tool for this is cultural behaviour. Here, we discuss anthropogenic environmental changes of hunter-gatherers and present new palaeoecological and palynological data. The studies are framed with ethnoarchaeological data from Western Siberia to gain a better understanding of how different triggers lead to coping mechanisms. For archaeological implication, we use two Mesolithic case studies from Germany: One of them focuses on hazelnut economy around ancient Lake Duvensee, and the other broaches the issue of selective roe deer hunt and its consequences at the site of Friesack. We address the archaeological evidence from the perspective of active alteration and its consequences, starting our argumentation from a perspective of niche construction theory. This approach has rarely been applied to early Holocene hunter-gatherers in Northern Europe even though the available data render possible to discuss human–environment interaction from such a perspective. It is demonstrated that archaeological research has tools at hand that enables to detect anthropogenic niche construction. However, the ethnoarchaeological example shows limitations and archaeologically invisible triggers and consequent results of human adaptations. The critical revision of such perspectives based on empirical data provides a better understanding of social and environmental transformations in the early- and mid-Holocene.
... Our first hypothesis tests for the relationship between distance and foraging group size. Central place foragers tend to deplete resources close to the central place, and Martu shift foraging camp location, often from day to day, depending on immediate depletion of monitor lizards (Bliege Bird et al., 2013;Codding et al., 2016b). Resource depletion is thus a function of the cost of travel from the central place. ...
... The number of Martu choosing to travel to particular locales and forage together is a function not simply of extrinsic habitat quality, but the product of the balance between the opposing forces of prior predation (which immediately reduces resource availability locally) and prior fire frequency (which tends to increase resource availability at landscape scales). This has a predictable effect on foraging group size and its spatial expression (Codding et al., 2016b). In the summer, more distant habitats induce smaller groups, while in the winter, distance produces larger groups. ...
Mobile hunter-gatherers are often characterized as living in small communities where mobility and group size are products of the environmentally determined distribution of resources, and where social organization is multi-scalar: groups of co-residents are nested within small communities that are, in turn, nested within small-scale societies. Such organization is often assumed to be reflective of the human past, emerging as human cognition and communication evolved through earlier fission-fusion social processes, typical of many primate social systems. We review the history of this assumption in light of recent empirical data of co-residence and social networks among contemporary hunter-gatherers. We suggest that while residential and foraging groups are often small, there is little evidence that these groups are drawn from small communities nested within small-scale societies. Most mobile hunter-gatherers live in groups dominated by links between non-relatives, where residential group membership is fluid and supports large-scale social networks of interaction. We investigate these dynamics with fine-grained observational data on Martu foraging groups and social organization in Australia's Western Desert. The composition of Martu foraging groups is distinct from that of residential groups, although both are dominated by ties between individuals who have no close biological relationships. The number of individuals in a foraging group varies with habitat quality, but in a dynamic way, as group size is shaped by ecological legacies of land use. The flexible size and composition of foraging groups link individuals across their "estates": spatially explicit storehouses of ritual and relational wealth, inherited across generations through maintaining expansive networks of social interaction in a large and complex society. We propose that human cognition is tied to development of such expansive social relationships and co-evolved with dynamic socio-ecological interactions expressed in large-scale networks of relational wealth.
... Different ethnoarchaeological studies also support the prediction that discarding of small materials is likely to occur in situ, while larger items are moved away from activity areas, since they hinder ongoing activities within a site (e.g., Binford, 1978Binford, , 1983Brooks & Yellen, 1987;Stevenson, 1991 (Hitchcock, 1987;O'Connell, 1987;Stevenson, 1991). In this sense, it is inferred that the increase in duration or number of occupations is correlated to the development level of size sorting processes and the size of the archaeological assemblage (Clark, 2016;Codding, Zeanah, Bliege Bird, Parker & Bird, 2016). ...
We explore the implications of the spatial structure of the artifact assemblages at the Binushmuka I site, located in the north coast of the Beagle Channel (Tierra del Fuego). The information corresponding to the stratigraphy, chronology and composition of the archaeological assemblages of this site is described. We focus on the spatial distribution of artifacts, which mainly depend on the number and duration of the occupations and the size of the group, to evaluate the temporal structure of the assemblages. For assessing pattern mobility, we also consider the spatial consistency of the location of the site in relation to features of the paleogeography and the archaeological landscape. The confined size of the assemblages (-7-8 m2) are likely to represent occupations by small sized groups. The spatial consistency between early Holocene occupations and marine hunter-gatherer assemblages observed at a regional level suggests that groups with similar mobility and foraging strategies could have occupied the site.
