Meat at the origins of agriculture

Abstract

The northern U.S. Southwest was once home to the Ancestral Puebloans (also called the Anasazi), famous for their impressive architecture, beautiful ceramics, and ability to succeed as corn farmers in the harsh Southwestern desert. The agricultural products so important to these people first entered the region during the Basketmaker II (BM II) period, most broadly thought to have lasted from around 1500 B.C. to A.D. 500.Since the BM II period marks the initial presence of corn-based agriculture in the region, most attention regarding the BM II diet has focused on plant resources and levels of dependency upon agricultural products. In contrast, thorough analyses regarding how BM II groups utilized wild animal resources have been considerably rare. As a result, we are left with an incomplete view of the BM II diet. Archaeologists are thus unable to determine how early farmers in the northern U.S. Southwest integrated wild and domesticated resources, or how the use of those resources might have changed during the ~2,000 year long BM II period. This is unfortunate, as the BM II diet was likely quite variable across the geographically diverse landscape of the northern U.S. Southwest as well as chronologically, owing to environmental changes and/or restrictions, settlement and mobility patterns, and demographic pressure.To address these concerns and better understand patterns in BM II faunal use, faunal data from BM II sites must be more diligently investigated and set into a regional framework of settlement studies, geographic distribution, and site chronology. The Dissertation before you begins to do just that by analyzing patterns in BM II faunal use as they vary over time and across space. This is achieved by a) presenting the results of my analysis of more than 15,000 animal bones from the Darkmold site, a recently excavated BM II site located in Southwestern Colorado; and b) synthesizing the published faunal data from 30 additional BM II sites. This data is then analyzed to identify geographic and chronological patterns regarding which taxa different BM II populations relied upon.While the general goal of this project will be to understand the broad trends in BM II faunal use, the analysis of these trends will focus on evaluating the following hypothesis: Sedentism and a lack of domesticated sources of protein during the BM II period resulted in the overharvesting of high-ranking wild fauna and a subsequent reliance upon smaller, lower-ranking fauna. This hypothesis is addressed by creating a better understanding of 1) which taxa were available to be utilized at different locations and at different times, 2) how demographic and environmental factors impacted the ways in which different BM II groups interacted with the animals in their surrounding environments, and 3) to what degree resource stress and overharvesting of faunal resources was a problem faced by these early agriculturalists. While addressing these concerns, it has been determined that instances of resource stress did occur during the BM II period, mos...