The animal body-part utility indices developed by Lewis Binford have been used to interpret faunal assemblages ranging from Plio-Pleistocene sites in East Africa to a late prehistoric bison kill in the High Plains of North America. Little attention, however, has been placed on refining or further developing these scales of economic utility. We examine Binford's derivation of the modified general utility index (MGUI) and demonstrate that it is needlessly complex. A nearly identical index, the food utility index (FUI), is presented. It simply scales variation in the amount of meat, marrow, and bone grease associated with different caribou body parts. We then use the insights provided by this simple scale to explore relations among economic utility, differential body-part representation, and human decision making.

Archeologists have long assumed that transport considerations have been important in structuring various aspects of the archeological record. An optimality model, derived from the principles of evolutionary ecology, is presented to investigate the trade‐off between field processing and transport for central place foragers. The model implicates (1) the time required to make a round‐trip and (2) the relationship between time spent field processing and increase in the utility of the transported load as the two critical factors determining what parts of resources are likely to be returned to a residential camp.

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This paper presents the results of a research project investigating the types, frequencies, and spatial distribution of small items of refuse on and in floors of a prehistoric structure–the Heartbreak Hotel–excavated in central Utah. Excavation and analytical procedures specifically were designed to recover microrefuse–refuse with a minimum dimension of less than .25 cm. There is strong empirical support for the proposition that microrefuse recovered from such contexts will be found in its area of production, and that patterning in its spatial distribution will, other things being equal, indicate spatial patterning in the performance of the activities that produced the microrefuse. We demonstrate that there is rather dramatic patterning in the types and frequencies of microrefuse between and within rooms of the structure and discuss possible explanations for the character of that patterning. We conclude with a discussion of the present limitations of our understanding of refuse disposal and suggest avenues of ethnoarchaeological inquiry likely to produce better archaeological and behavioral expectations relating to spatial patterning of microrefuse.