Brian F. Codding's research while affiliated with University of Utah and other places
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Publications (112)
Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work – we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the p...
Sea mussels and turban snails are among the most abundant mollusks recovered from central California middens. Experimental harvests of these and other shellfish have been conducted to help interpret archaeological findings, but methodological complications have plagued many of the early experiments. Here we report results of harvest experiments of...
El Niño has profound influences on ecosystem dynamics. However, we know little about how it shapes vertebrate faunal community composition over centennial time scales, and this limits our ability to forecast change under projections of future El Niño events. On the basis of correlations between geological records of past El Niño frequency and the s...
Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the p...
Inter-personal violence (whether intra- or inter-group) is a pervasive yet highly variable human behavior. Evolutionary anthropologists suggest that the abundance and distribution of resources play an important role in influencing differences in rates of violence, with implications for how resource conditions structure adaptive payoffs. Here, we as...
Significance
Warfare and homicide are pervasive features of the human experience, yet scholars struggle to understand the conditions that promote violence. Climate and conflict research has revealed many linkages between climate change and human violence; however, studies often produce contrary findings, and the driving mechanisms remain difficult...
Indigenous people throughout North America were dramatically affected by the invasion of European colonizers. Growing evidence suggests that, among many strategies for survival and perseverance, increased sedentism was common; it often resulted from either forced resettlement or attempts to access European resources. We present artifactual, paleoet...
From 2014 to 2020, we compiled radiocarbon ages from the lower 48 states, creating a database of more than 100,000 archaeological, geological, and paleontological ages that will be freely available to researchers through the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database. Here, we discuss the process used to compile ages, general characteristics of t...
Explaining the factors that influence past dietary variation is critically important for understanding changes in subsistence, health, and status in past societies; yet systematic studies comparing possible driving factors remain scarce. Here we compile the largest dataset of past diet derived from stable isotope δ¹³C‰ and δ¹⁵N‰ values in the Ameri...
Obtaining and transporting material for manufacturing flaked stone tools comes at a cost. Numerous studies evaluate how processing may reduce transport costs, often using models of optimal foraging theory such as central place foraging and field processing. However, to date these studies do not adequately address the continued reuse of toolstone th...
Comparative analysis using cross-cultural data has a long tradition in anthropology and applications by ecologically minded researchers have exploded in the past decade. Here we discuss problems and recommend solutions for use of cross-cultural datasets in ecology.
Significance
The idea of precipitous continent-wide population decline beginning ca. 1492 has long influenced ecological and social narratives of North America. We analyze the largest systematic dataset of mortality records ( n = 33,715 individuals) yet compiled across North America coupling archaeological and historic data to evaluate the nature a...
Significance
Identifying how past human populations altered ecosystems is critical for understanding current ecological diversity and for the management of both natural and cultural resources. This study presents evidence for an enduring ecological legacy of ancient people on the Colorado Plateau, where the complexity of archaeological sites correl...
The spread of agriculture is a major driver of social and environmental change throughout the Holocene, yet experimental and ethnographic data indicate that farming is less profitable than foraging, so why would individuals choose to adopt agriculture leading to its expansion? Ideal distribution models offer one framework to answer this question: I...
The extinction of California’s flightless duck, Chendytes lawi, stands out in the faunal history of North America because it involved a marine animal that disappeared in the late Holocene, not in the terminal Pleistocene when humans arrived from Asia, nor with the more recent entry of Europeans and associated resource exploitation. Here we evaluate...
Climatic conditions exert an important influence on wildfire activity in the western United States; however, Indigenous farming activity may have also shaped the local fire regimes for millennia. The Fish Lake Plateau is located on the Great Basin–Colorado Plateau boundary, the only region in western North America where maize farming was adopted th...
Significance
Persistent differences in wealth and power are pervasive in contemporary societies, yet were absent or muted for most of human history. To help explain how and why institutionalized hierarchy can arise in egalitarian systems, we examine a sample of Native American hunting and gathering societies that vary in the degree of inequality. S...
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 coupli...
Predictive models are central to both archaeological research and cultural resource management. Yet, archaeological applications of predictive models are often insufficient due to small training data sets, inadequate statistical techniques, and a lack of theoretical insight to explain the responses of past land use to predictor variables. Here we a...
Human populations distribute themselves across landscapes in clearly patterned ways, but accurate and theoretically informed predictions and explanations of that patterning in the archaeological record can prove difficult. Recently, archaeologists have begun applying a unifying theoretical framework derived from population and behavioural ecology t...
Human adaptation depends on the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring hunters...
How might subsistence strategies structure the costs and benefits of habitat selection and, therefore, drive settlement patterning? We explore this question within an Ideal Distribution framework, arguing that (i) a habitat can be decomposed into its environmental covariates, (ii) their relative contributions to suitability can vary as a function o...
Woodland ecosystems, dominant on nearly 4% of all terrestrial land globally, are faced with a variety of threats, including increasingly prolonged and severe droughts, invasive insect outbreaks, and the rapid spread of pathogens. While many remote sensing methods have been developed for the detection and quantification of mortality in forested envi...
Recent research emphasises the importance of both within-group cooperation and between-group competition for human sociality, past and present. We hypothesise that the shift from foraging to food production in eastern North America provided novel socioecological conditions that impacted interpersonal and intergroup interactions in the region, inspi...
For nearly 50 years, a subset of California archaeology has been concerned with the possible effects of prehistoric hunting on indigenous fauna. This interest began in earnest in the late 1960s when Paul S. Martin proposed the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis in which he argued that the entire North American continent ca. 13,000 years ago was essent...
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...
Predictive modeling in archaeology is critical to making informed land management decisions and answering key anthropological research questions. However, archaeological predictive modeling suffers from several theoretical, empirical, and analytical problems. To address these shortcomings, we build on theory from behavioral ecology and statistical...
Human adaptation depends upon the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning will benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring...
Surface-harvested biofuels, of which firewood is a major constituent,
comprised the major extra-somatic energy source for all humans until
very recently. Even today, roughly one-third of the global population
depends on surface fuels harvested daily from woodlands and forests.
This economic relationship forms the basis for a long and continuing
con...
The primacy of past human activity in triggering change in earth’s ecosystems remains a contested idea. Treating human-environmental dynamics as a dichotomous phenomenon – turning “on” or “off” at some tipping point in the past – misses the broader, longer-term, and varied role humans play in creating lasting ecological legacies. To investigate the...
Executive proclamation 9682 reduces the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), removing protections for at least 2,000 known archaeological sites and an unknown number of undiscovered cultural properties. Because only 10% of the GSENM's 1.9 million acres has been inventoried by archaeologists, fully evaluating the potentia...
Explanations for the complex human decisions that lead to territoriality have focused on models of economic defendability. While powerful, these models fail to explain variation in territorial behavior in all cases. To help overcome this limitation, here we offer an approach that synthesizes the logic of economic defendability with a general optima...
Explaining how and why populations settle a new landscape is central to many questions in American archaeology. Recent advances in settlement research have adopted predictions from the Ideal Free Distribution model (IFD). While tests of IFD predictions to date rely either on archaeologically derived coarse-grained diachronic data or ethnographicall...
Ethnographic populations throughout Western North America relied on strategies and institutions to protect resources for exclusive use, though the degree of territorial defense varied significantly across the region. Attempts to explain this variation typically focus on the ecological contexts that promote economic defensibility, however, it is inc...
Humans modify their environments in ways that significantly transform the earth's ecosystems.[1-3] Recent research suggests that such niche-constructing behaviors are not passive human responses to environmental variation, but instead should be seen as active and intentional management of the environment.[4-10] Although such research is useful in h...
The use of stone tools by macaques in Thailand has reduced the size and population density of coastal shellfish: previously it was thought that overharvesting effects resulted from human activity alone.
In arid Australia, the antiquity, role and ecological contexts of ‘firestick’ farming in seed-based foraging economies remain unclear. We use Landsat imagery to analyse effects of contemporary Martu hunting fires on seed-bearing grasses and forbs. Today, Martu rarely harvest wild seeds but inadvertently foster patches of grass when they burn to hun...
Objectives:
The expansion of Numic speaking populations into the Great Basin required individuals to adapt to a relatively unproductive landscape. Researchers have proposed numerous social and subsistence strategies to explain how and why these settlers were able to replace any established populations, including private property and intensive plan...
The remarkable finds from the trans-Holocene archaeological record excavated at Hogup Cave, Utah, helped define our understanding of Great Basin prehistory. However, many scholars doubt the integrity of the site's depositional sequence and resulting chronological interpretations. To resolve these concerns, we produce several Bayesian chronological...
We utilized the Dyson-Hudson and Smith model of economic defensibility, combined with the Charnov patch choice in an effort to help explain the threshold for territorial behavior within foraging populations. We found that as foraging becomes more intensive and populations become more dense, there is a greater likelihood of both ownership of goods a...
The killing of Cecil the lion ( Panthera leo ) ignited enduring and increasingly global discussion about trophy hunting [[1][1]]. Yet, policy debate about its benefits and costs (e.g. [[2][2],[3][3]]) focuses only on the hunted species and biodiversity, not the unique behaviour of hunters. Some
Significance
From warfare to homicide, lethal violence is an all too common aspect of the human experience, yet we still do not have a clear explanation of why individuals kill one another. We suggest the search for an answer should begin with an empirical understanding of where and when individuals are more prone to experience violence. Examining...
Abstract: Many suggest the Numic expansion was facilitated by the adoption of social and subsistence strategies with a competitive advantage over in situ populations: 1) a focus on food resources with high processing costs, and 2) the adoption of private property. We propose an alternative hypothesis: the use of intentionally-set landscape fire as...
The (re)introduction of the horse to North America brought dramatic changes to American Indians. However, not all populations were affected equally; the horse became central to some societies, but had seemingly little effect on others. This variation is seen across Great Basin ethnographic groups, where some populations adopted the horse for transp...
Recent investigations of an open-air site(26La4434) along the northern shore ofPleistocene Lake Gilbert in Grass Valley,Nevada (left) revealed a buried deposit withpreserved organic material and Prearchaictechnology. Here we report preliminary analysesexamining the stratigraphy, chronology, artifactsand faunal remains recovered from the site. We of...
Dataset S1. Data of corrected and observed summed probability distributions (SPDs), site counts, and generalized additive model (GAM) fits per 100 year intervals from 0–15,000 cal BP.
Text S1: A series of simulations using idealized population data that was randomly sampled to represent radiocarbon dates in order to validate the methodological approach used in this paper.
Figure S4. Relative population density from a calibrated and taphonomically corrected (52) summed probability distribution (SPD) of site counts through time fit with a generalized additive model (GAM). The plot illustrates the model fit with confidence intervals and is color coded to indicate significant (a=0.01) periods of increase (blue) and decr...
Figure S1. Kernel density summed probability distribution (SPD) plots with 95% confidence intervals following the Sheather-Jones method (60) of calibrated median radiocarbon dates for raw and taphonomically corrected (52) dates.
Figure S5. Relative population density from a calibrated but not taphonomically corrected (52) summed probability distribution (SPD) of site counts through time fit with a generalized additive model (GAM). The plot illustrates the model fit with confidence intervals and is color coded to indicate significant (a=0.01) periods of increase (blue) and...
Figure S2. Unadjusted residuals for each 100 year interval showing the difference between values of the summed probability distributions (SPDs) and the fitted values of the generalized additive models (GAMs) for observed and taphonomically corrected radiocarbon dates. GAM fits are less accurate from 0–1,000 cal BP given the high rate of change in t...
Figure S3. Relative population density from a calibrated but not taphonomically corrected (52) summed probability distribution of radiocarbon dates through time fit with a generalized additive model (GAM). The plot illustrates the model fit with confidence intervals and is color coded to indicate significant (a=0.01) periods of increase (blue) and...
The transition to agriculture is one of the most significant events in human prehistory; yet, explaining why people initially domesticated plants and animals remains a contentious research problem in archaeology. Two competing hypotheses dominate current debates. The first draws on niche construction theory to emphasize how intentional management o...
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...
While evidence mounts that indigenous burning has a significant role in shaping pyrodiversity, the processes explaining its variation across local and external biophysical systems remain limited. This is especially the case with studies of climate–fire interactions, which only recognize an effect of humans on the fire regime when they act independe...
Aboriginal foraging systems in Australia’s Western Desert have been structured around landscape-burning practices for millennia. These systems are mediated at one end by factors that influence an immediate-return economy and at the other by the way that burning transforms vegetative succession and habitat heterogeneity (pyrodiversity). The distinct...
The Anthropocene colloquially refers to a global regime of human-caused environmental modification of earth systems associated with profound changes in patterns of human mobility, as well as settlement and resource use compared with prior eras. Some have argued that the processes generating the Anthropocene are mainly associated with population gro...
In a recent paper, Zeder (1) outlines core archaeological questions in domestication research, highlighting the importance of defining the process, when it happened, and why it happened in various global contexts. Importantly, she emphasizes the utility of separating initial domestication from intensive agricultural practices, pointing out that oft...
Many evolutionary arguments fossilize a human division of labor as one of man the hunter, and woman the gatherer, with differences in labor arising out of the effectiveness of efficiency. We suggest here that arguments based solely on the efficiency of labor specialization among heterosexual married pairs over-generalize divisions of labor that are...
Fire is increasingly recognized as a central evolutionary force shaping the earth’s ecosystems. This is especially observable in the fire-prone American West, where indigenous populations frequently used low-intensity burns to modify their habitats for myriad purposes. Given the variability of environments within the Great Basin, the effects of ant...
Across Western North America, hunter-gatherers modified their surrounding environment with the application of fire. However, to date we lack a general theoretical framework to investigate the reasons why people would burn or its effects on traditional foraging economies. To begin to fill in these gaps, we examine the immediate benefits fire may pro...
Keywords: Broad spectrum revolution Foraging theory Marginal Value Theorem Seed use Martu Western Australia Last Glacial Maximum Sexual division of labor Ground stone a b s t r a c t Seed-reliant, hunting and gathering economies persisted in arid Australia until the mid-twentieth century when Aboriginal foragers dropped seeds from their diets. Expl...
A tremendous amount has been learned about the Prearchaic (before 9000 BP) Great Basin since we advocated a perspective of sexual division of labor based on Human Behavioral Ecology a decade ago. Many investigators have taken our advice and a few have challenged our assumptions and inferences. One of the most substantive critiques has been that we...
Studies of conservation in small scale societies typically portray indigenous peoples as either sustainably managing resources, or forsaking long-term sustainability for short-term gains. To explain this variability, we propose an alternative framework derived from a co-evolutionary perspective. In environments with long histories of consistent int...
Archaeological evidence of shellfish exploitation along the coast of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) points to an apparent paradox. While the continental record as a whole suggests that human populations were very low from initial colonization through early Holocene, coastal and peri-coastal sites dating to that time are dominated by small...
Shellfish are a crucial resource for past and present subsistence-level societies around the world. Despite the diversity of environments in which shellfish are exploited, an examination of the global patterns of shellfish exploitation reveal surprisingly common patterns in the opportunities allowed and constraints imposed by relying on shellfish....
Anthropogenic fire is a form of ecosystem engineering that creates greater landscape patchiness at small spatial scales: such rescaling of patch diversity through mosaic burning has been argued to be a form of niche construction, the loss of which may have precipitated the decline and extinction of many endemic species in the Western Desert of Aust...
