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... Finally, we compared the Abric Romaní assemblages using information from the faunal assemblages of the Hadza campsites of Mugugu and Tispitibe, published by Lupo (2001). The Hadza are a hunter-gatherer group that has been intensely studied with regard to different social and economic aspects, and especially concerning their animal carcass discard and transport strategies (Bunn, 1993;Bunn et al., , 1991Monahan, 1998;O'Connell, 1993;O'Connell et al., 1988aO'Connell et al., , 1988bO'Connell et al., , 1990. At these two sites, the faunal remains were collected from the surface and subsurface at a depth of 10 cm, the MNE was calculated using all identified parts (including the diagnostic limb bone shaft), and the assemblages were formed through the overlapping of events/occupations (Lupo, 2001). ...
... The studies conducted by Gifford-Gonzalez (1993) and Monahan (1998) indicate that some of the variables that affect the transport decisions of these groups are the weight of the animals, the number of people involved in the hunt, the number of carriers and the possibility of calling more people to help, the number of hunted animals, the anatomy of the animal itself, the cost of processing and transporting a carcass, competition with other carnivores in the environment, and the distance to the camp. Ethnographic studies of the Hadza indicate that there are even more variables in play, such as the hunger of the hunters and the toolkit they are carrying Bunn, 1993;Monahan, 1998;O'Connell, 1993;O'Connell et al., 1988aO'Connell et al., , 1988bO'Connell et al., , 1990Oliver, 1993). More recently, Schoville and Otárola-Castillo (2014) asserted that, for the Hadza, the most important factors in deciding which body parts are transported are the number of carriers, the size of the animal and the distance from the camp. ...
... Based on this information, we know that the Hadza use a variety of different transport strategies for all animal sizeweights (Bunn, 1993;Bunn et al., , 1991Lupo, 2001;Monahan, 1998;O'Connell, 1993;O'Connell et al., 1988aO'Connell et al., , 1988bO'Connell et al., , 1990. This behaviour results in bone accumulations created by multiple transport events (Lupo, 2001). ...
We evaluated the skeletal profiles from several levels of the Neanderthal site of AbricRomaní, focusing on the methodology proposed by Faith and Gordon (2007): differencesin the skeletal distribution of animals in accordance with their size and weight; the sta-tistical correlation between the skeletal profiles and standard food utility index; and theanatomical diversity of size-weight categories. Results indicate an unconstrained transportstrategy in all levels and all size-weight categories. However, we also found differences inthe skeletal distribution of medium-sized and large animals, which may be due to differ-ent transport strategies. These characteristics suggest that the superposition of transportand occupation events could be responsible for our results. In addition, we applied thesame analysis to Hadza assemblages, which revealed similar results to those found at AbricRomaní. The most striking feature of the Hadza assemblages examined is the superpositionof transport events as a result of successive occupation/deposition events. This suggeststhat the transport strategies used by Neanderthals at Abric Romaní are also characterizedby a high degree of diversity in transport decisions.
... The types of artifacts and features observed, as well as their spatial distributions on an archaeological site can provide a researcher with the tools to make inferences concerning the prehistoric occupants' use of space, household and group size, and social organization (Binford 1983;O'Connell 1993). The presence of formal habitation and storage structures, trash discard areas, and discrete activity areas are believed to be indicative of long-term occupation (Binford 1983; see also Jones 1993). ...
... This same information can also be used to address questions pertaining to the intensity of occupation, duration of occupation, and the settlement and mobility strategies of the prehistoric occupants (Kent 1992). And while ethnographic analogies should not be used to define any prehistoric group's use of an area, they act as useful tools to describe the variation and possibilities for a given region so that the most informed interpretations can be made (Trigger 2006;David and Kramer 2001;Binford 1983;O'Connell 1993). ...
... Whether or not this site served as a resource procurement camp, or a home base (cf. Binford 1983;O'Connell 1993) has yet to be determined. Whatever the case may be, bone tools, groundstone, thermal features indicate a relatively intense occupation, and only additional research will more readily address these questions. ...
... New approaches to environment, behavior, and culture in the Great Basin are influenced by new evolutionary perspectives and employ models drawn from behavioral ecology (e.g., Barlow and Metcalfe, 1996;Bettinger and Baumhoff, 1982;Kelly, 1990Kelly, , 1995aKelly, , 1996bO'Connell, 1993;O'Connell et al., 1982;Elston, 1988, 1989;Raven, 1990b;Simms, 1985Simms, , 1987Zeanah et al., 1995). ...
... At the same time, however, greater consideration has to be given to internal site structure as intense analyses of sites--the White Mountain villages come to mind ~till provide important tests of hypotheses. Ethnoarchaeology has given us a better understanding of forager site structure, one important observation being that relevant patterning may be observed only on large scales, requiring excavations much larger than those we normally see (see O'Connell, 1987O'Connell, , 1993Simms, 1989;Metcalfe and Heath, 1990;Tipps, 1993). ...
Late Holocene Great Basin prehistory is a spatial and temporal mosaic of lifeways related to changing physical and social environments. Evidence shows changes in technology, subsistence, foraging tactics, and population density, though the causes of these changes are still under investigation. Current research has emphasized the role of wetlands and, related to this, the so-called Numic expansion, whose timing and nature are still poorly understood. Behavioral ecology applied to a macroregional scale probably offers the most useful approach to solving this and other issues, given the exigencies of hunter-gatherer archaeology in a desert environment.
... Ethnoarchaeological investigations among the Mikea of Madagascar corroborates that as the length of site occupation increases the distance between the trash creating activity location and where it is deposited also increases (Kelly et al. 2005). 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.
... Ethnoarchaeological investigations among the Mikea of Madagascar corroborates that as the length of site occupation increases the distance between the trash creating activity location and where it is deposited also increases (Kelly et al. 2005). 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.
... As an alternative, we propose and implement an approach that uses measures of sites structure as proxies for larger scale patterns which should be structured by environmental variability. This is not new in itself (e.g., Binford, 1980), but is novel in linking these proxies to a general theory of behavior that provides deductive, a priori predictions that avoid the problems associated with direct ethnographic analogy (O'Connell, 1993(O'Connell, , 1995. This approach does not completely resolve all the issues of site structure-especially those resulting from formation or investigation bias-but we hope this application will inspire future studies of site structure to examine these and develop other avenues to link patterned spatial variation in deposited material to larger ecological patterns of human decisions that can be explained by a general theory of behavior. ...
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 clear explanation for this. At large spatial extents, human behavior is constrained by patterned ecological variability, as such, a general theory of behavior is likely to characterize key aspects of human decisions. At small spatial extents, human behavior is not constrained by patterned ecological variability, therefore, the human decisions that produce site structure should be driven by mechanical constraints or random variation. However, variation in site structure may be ecologically relevant inasmuch as it informs on landscape level variation in human-environment interactions. Drawing on ethnoarchaeological data collected in collaboration with Martu, Aboriginal foragers in Western Australia, here we test empirically-derived, mechanistic predictions on site size and material size sorting to show how these can inform theoretically-derived, adaptive predictions from the Marginal Value Theorem. Results show that site size increases with the number of occupants and hence, the amount of in-patch foraging competition, while size sorting increases with the duration of occupation and hence, in-patch residence time. Combined, these attributes of site structure can be used as proxies of foraging behavior to explain variability in overall foraging yields. With this approach, site structure can provide insights into foraging decisions that can be examined through a general theory of behavior.
... Whenever possible socioeconomic studies should incorporate the types and abundances of artifact classes, the types and sizes of households, environmental data, and detailed inventories and taphonomic analyses of the animal remains, both big and small. These data can only be of use when large-scale and finegrained field methods are employed, including the excavation of large exposures (e.g., O'Connell, 1993;Simms and Heath, 1990) and the recovery of artifacts and ecofacts in direct association with individual structures (e.g., Ashby, 2002 and references therein). ...
Zooarchaeological analyses often draw inferences on socioeconomic status from the composition of bone assemblages associated with houses and other structures in residential sites. In this paper, we test how well faunal assemblages reflect socioeconomic differences among contemporary farmer households in two rural villages in the Central African Republic. Independent measures of wealth are tallied and ranked for six households in each village, including complete inventories of the types and numbers of material goods and the sizes of residential structures and agricultural fields. These data are compared against the associated food bones collected from household trash middens and activity areas, including skeletal abundances, large mammal body part representation, and taxonomic diversity. In most instances larger and more taxonomically diverse faunal assemblages are associated with houses of means and the faunas do, in fact, reflect differences in socioeconomic status. However, faunal “wealth” may be linked to factors unrelated to social or economic inequalities, notably the presence of active hunters. Our analyses suggest that small animals provide useful and important data in assessing socioeconomic means, and comparative studies of wealth in archaeological contexts should not be based on bones alone.
James F. O’Connell is one of the most influential ethnoarchaelogists, especially so for his contributions to the development of behavioral ecology in anthropology. His scholarship in Australian archaeology and his ethnographic work with Hadza hunter-gatherers are probably best known. However, his intellectual development in the archaeology of Western North America and commitment to Australian ethnography remain underappreciated. Here I trace details of his ethnoarchaeological roots – from his background in Great Basin archaeology through his early ethnographic work in Australia – to demonstrate the maturation of an increasingly relevant and important approach to understanding human-environmental interactions.
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Ethnoarchaeology is the study of relationships between human behavior and its material consequences in the present. Practitioners hope to establish consistent links between the two that can be used to interpret archaeological evidence of human behavior in the past. Much of this work is descriptive: analysts seldom attempt to explain variation in the behavior they observe, instead simply documenting its archaeological implications. This limits the utility of their results. At best, they can only identify the past distribution of ethnographically known behavior. Evidence of anything else is uninterpretable; the behavioral variability it reflects inexplicable. This problem can be resolved only by linking ethnoarchaeology with a general theory of behavior. Neo-Darwinian behavioral ecology may provide the necessary framework. Recent ethnoarchaeological work on site structure and faunal remains, especially as applied in research on the Paleolithic, illustrates both the problem and the appeal of the proposed solution.
Skeletal profiles of medium-sized prey (>40 kg) are often used by archaeologists as one line of evidence to infer prehistoric body-part transport patterns. However, recent theoretical and ethnoarchaeological research is divided over the types of bone assemblages that have the best potential for accurately reflecting transport and discard patterns. This paper quantitatively evaluates the usefulness of skeletal part profiles as evidence of differential transport from ethnoarchaeological Hadza bone assemblages. Skeletal part abundances from different types of Hadza sites (butchering sites, a hunting blind, and a residential base) are compared to previously reported observations of body part transport/discard decisions (O'Connell et al. 1988, 1990). Analysis of these assemblages suggests that observed Hadza transport/discard decisions are more accurately reflected by small-scale, single-event butchering stands. Larger-sized bone assemblages representing amalgamations of many butchering events poorly reflect observed transport and discard patterns. The results of this analysis show that under circumstances where prey are singly acquired, small sites may reveal a far more accurate picture of prehistoric body-part transport patterns than large and highly visible archaeological sites.
Important for considerations of hunter–gatherer mobility is delineating what the presence of house remains in the archaeological record from an environmentally marginal area represents in terms of mobility patterns—especially the duration of site occupation and the stability of these patterns from year to year. Some insights into the archaeological record concerning houses and mobility in a marginal environment can be obtained by investigating several lines of evidence: the design and substantialness of the represented structures; the density and diversity of the recovered remains; the distribution of the remains and whether refuse cleaning was practiced; the kinds, relative efficiency, and quantity of resources exploited; the presence or absence of long-term storage facilities; and the possibility of site reuse. The excavation of 41 pit structures or housepits at 21 sites in the Wyoming and Big Horn basins of Wyoming dating to the mid-Holocene provides an excellent opportunity to study hunter–gatherer mobility and houses in a marginal, low carrying capacity environment. The Wyoming housepits appear to represent short-term occupations of residentially mobile groups, who constructed these structures in anticipation of repeated visits and reuse over a period of years—exemplifying stable land use patterns.
Recent research on prehistoric hunter-gatherer site structure continues to be concerned primarily with the identification of discrete, activity-specific areas within sites (e.g., Carr 1984; Hietala 1984; Flannery 1986). However, an increasingly large body of ethnoarchaeological data suggests that such areas may be rare in the archaeological record, especially among middle- and low-latitude foragers (Yellen 1977; O’Connell 1987). Here we present additional data pertinent to this topic, derived from recent fieldwork among the Hadza of northern Tanzania. Preliminary analysis indicates that although activity areas can be identified within Hadza base camps, the range of activities associated with each are broad and broadly similar from area to area. Assumptions commonly made by archaeologists about the differential distribution of activities are only weakly supported by our data.
Secondary refuse disposal behavior is structured by three major concerns in the Maya Highlands: economy of effort, potential value of refuse, and potential hindrance by refuse. According to the needs of each household and the nature of the refuse, material slated for discard may be sorted and dumped in separate locations, within or outside compounds. Archaeologists should be aware of this refuse structure in seeking specific types of refuse as well as in comparing refuse from households, or other types of excavational units. At the household level, recognition of the toft area (the area immediately surrounding the household and related outbuildings) is especially important in acquiring representative samples of “hard” types of refuse. Analysis of neighborhood dumps is strongly advocated as one of the more economical, meaningful, and representative ways of dealing with refuse accumulations. Because of several randomizing and dispersive processes operating at the household level, as well as sample size considerations, simple diversity measures are recommended for comparing household assemblages.
The work reported here is based upon 170 days of observation among the Kua San (hereafter called Kua) in the east-central Kalahari of Botswana between 1985 and 1986. We concentrated on documenting formation processes and camp struture, especially as they were reflected in potentially durable bone food refuse. Through notes, photographs, videos, maps, and bone collections, we documented the range of activities associated with the procurement, processing, and discard of animal carcasses during an annual subsistence cycle of the Kua. By accompanying men and women on their foraging trips into the bush, we were able to document the nature and frequency of activity performance away from camps. The Kalahari data consist of maps, observational records, and the entire complement of bones from over 30 camps. The bones represent more than 100 larger mammals obtained and processed by the Kua. We offer some initial observations about the spatial structure of Kua camps and how this structure is reflected in the bone refuse. We first provide some background information on the study area and the Kua. Next, we characterize the five types of Kua camps we observed and the processes that formed the material refuse recovered from them, and we present examples to illustrate the structure of each type. Finally, we offer some preliminary conclusions about the nature of the spatial structure of these camps, especially the patterning in the bone food refuse, and we summarize some of the implications these may have for archaeological spatial analysis. -from Authors
Controlled comparisons of ethnographic Western Desert Australian Aborigine and !Kung San campsites reveal significant differences in mean distances between households as well as differences in campsite areas based on nearest neighbor analysis. In terms of campsite areas in m2/person, the Aborigines space themselves over areas many times greater than the !Kung. A review of alternative hypotheses to account for these differences supports a combination of kin-ties and larger campsite areas/person to explain the variance, while the gross overall differences in spacing households are structured primarily by the relative effects of predation pressure, which is inversely proportional to both mean distances between households and campsite areas in m2/person. Some trial comparisons with other ethnographic cases are offered, along with test implications for archaeology.
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