During late winter and spring, hunter-gatherers in temperate, subarctic, and arctic environments often relied on diets that provided marginal or inadequate caloric intakes. During such periods, particularly when stored food supplies dwindled or were used up entirely, lean meat became the principal source of energy. Nutritional problems associated with high-protein, low-energy diets are discussed. These problems include elevated metabolic rates, with correspondingly higher caloric requirements, and deficiencies in essential fatty acids. The relative benefits of adding fat or carbohydrate to a diet of lean meat are evaluated in light of the protein-sparing capacities of these two nutrients. Experimental data indicate that although both enhance high-protein, low-energy diets, carbohydrate is a more effective supplement than fat. Given the nutritional inadequacies of a lean-meat diet, the paper concludes with a discussion of alternative subsistence strategies that increase the availability of carbohydrate or fat at the critical time of year.

Economic intensification has been documented in a diversity of small-scale societies. The existing archaeological theory concerning such intensification has tended to privilege economic and political explanations and largely ignores social action and ritual performance as motivations for economic change. In this article, 1 use both ethnographic and archaeological data to argue that ceremonial feasting and the need for socially valued goods, which are critical for ritual performance and necessary for a variety of social transactions, create the demand that underwrites and sustains economic intensification in small-scale societies. Food for large-scale feasts is acquired through the intensification of food production and procurement targeted specifically for feasting, rather than from the surplus available from routine subsistence production. Large-scale demands for socially valued goods tend to result in specialization on the production of "extraordinary" material culture, which is characterized by two modes of circulation, in networks of social obligations or as offerings in sacred locations. [ E CONOMIC INTENSIFICATION has been documentedin prehistoric small-scale societies in a diversity of times and places. By small-scale 1 mean those societies ranging from several hundred to several thousand people in size and characterized by relatively uncentralized political systems. The explanations archaeologists have offered for economic intensification in such societies have largely been economic-and concern issues such as population and resource imbalance or risk avoidance (e.g., Netting 1990; Price and Brown 1985; Wills 1992)-or political, focusing on the actions of aspiring elites (e.g., Clark and Parry 1990; Halstead 1989; Hayden 1992; Renfrew 1982). Such approaches tend to ignore one of the most salient sources of increased economic production: the individual and communal ritual participation and performance of members of entire populations.My interest here is in documenting the ways in which people intensify their economic activities in response to the sustained demand engendered by communal and individual ceremonial obligations. 1 focus in particular on the acquisition of food used in feasts and on the production of objects that are critical for ritual performance and necessary for a variety of social transactions. 1 term the latter "socially valued goods" and discuss how the peculiar nature of demand from the ritual context influences their qualities and how the scale of demand shapes the organization of their production. 1 suggest that a primary motivation for subsistence intensification and craft specializa-tion in small-scale societies lies not in subsistence provisioning but in the demand for items critical for social reproduction. Specialized production to meet these demands can, in fact, become quite complex.Garwood and colleagues (1991) have discussed the difficulties that archaeologists have in defining ritual, noting that some approaches view ritual as a particular kind of social practice, while others...

This paper identifies rare climate challenges in the long-term history of seven areas, three in the subpolar North Atlantic Islands and four in the arid-to-semiarid deserts of the US Southwest. For each case, the vulnerability to food shortage before the climate challenge is quantified based on eight variables encompassing both environmental and social domains. These data are used to evaluate the relationship between the "weight" of vulnerability before a climate challenge and the nature of social change and food security following a challenge. The outcome of this work is directly applicable to debates about disaster management policy.anaging disasters, especially those that are climate-induced, calls for reducing vulnerabilities as an essential step in reducing impacts (1-8). Exposure to environmental risks is but one component of potential for disasters. Social, political, and economic processes play substantial roles in determining the scale and kind of impacts of hazards (1,(8)(9)(10)(11)(12). "Disasters triggered by natural hazards are not solely influenced by the magnitude and frequency of the hazard event (wave height, drought intensity etc.), but are also rather heavily determined by the vulnerability of the affected society and its natural environment" (ref. 1, p. 2). Thus, disaster planning and relief should address vulnerabilities, rather than returning a system to its previous condition following a disaster event (6).Using archaeologically and historically documented cultural and climate series from the North Atlantic Islands and the US Southwest, we contribute strength to the increasing emphasis on vulnerability reduction in disaster management. We ask whether there are ways to think about climate uncertainties that can help people build resilience to rare, extreme, and potentially devastating climate events. More specifically, we ask whether vulnerability to food shortfall before a climate challenge predicts the scale of impact of that challenge. Our goal is both to assess current understandings of disaster management and to aid in understanding how people can build the capability to increase food security and reduce their vulnerability to climate challenges.We present analyses of cases from substantially different regions and cultural traditions that show strong relationships between levels of vulnerability to food shortage before rare climate events and the impact of those events. The patterns and details of the different contexts support the view that vulnerability cannot be ignored. These cases offer a long-term view rarely included in studies of disaster management or human and cultural well-being (for exceptions, see refs. 13 and 14). This long time frame allows us to witness changes in the context of vulnerabilities and climate challenges, responding to a call for more attention to "how human security changes through time,

Over the past five decades, ecologists and archaeologists have dismantled two longstanding theoretical constructs. Ecologists have rejected the “balance of nature” concept and archaeologists have dispelled the myth that indigenous people were “in harmony with nature”. Rejection of these concepts poses critical challenges to both fields as current disciplinary approaches are inadequate to grapple effectively with real‐world complexities of socioecological systems. In this review, we focus on the relationship between human action and ecosystem change by examining some of the long‐term impacts of prehistoric agriculture. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we present results from two studies that suggest that even relatively non‐intensive and short‐term agriculture can transform ecological systems for a very long time. It is therefore imperative that ecologists and archaeologists work more closely together, creating a truly cross‐disciplinary alliance that will help to advance the fields of archaeology and ecology.