Sexual division of labor and central place foraging: a model for the Carson Desert of western Nevada

Evolutionary Ecology, Resource Depression, and Niche Construction Theory: Applications to Central California Hunter-Gatherers and Mimbres-Mogollon Agriculturalists

“…Zeanah (2000Zeanah ( , 2004 has developed a central place foraging model that shows that because of travel and transport costs, efficiency is maximized by locating residential sites nearest to the resources that provide the highest overall returns. In the one instance in which a detailed test of Zeanah's model has been conducted, involving Late Holocene hunter-gatherer archaeological data from the Carson Desert of Western Nevada (Zeanah 2004), model predictions were well supported.…”

“…Zeanah (2000Zeanah ( , 2004 has developed a central place foraging model that shows that because of travel and transport costs, efficiency is maximized by locating residential sites nearest to the resources that provide the highest overall returns. In the one instance in which a detailed test of Zeanah's model has been conducted, involving Late Holocene hunter-gatherer archaeological data from the Carson Desert of Western Nevada (Zeanah 2004), model predictions were well supported. In light of this, it is reasonable to expect that shifts in settlement location in the Mimbres area would have occurred in response to changes in the relative returns of foraging and farming and that those shifts would therefore reflect changes in the proportion of time that individuals allocated to each activity (they may also have implications relevant to the sexual division of labor, though those are beyond the scope of this paper: see Zeanah 2004).…”

Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology

“…Working in the Carson Desert of western Nevada and building on earlier research by Raven and Elston (1989) and Kelly (2001), Zeanah (2004) attacked this problem by (1) identifying the resources potentially available to late prehistoric foragers, (2) isolating those most likely to be targeted in pursuit of men's and women's foraging goals, respectively, (3) plotting their distribution across a wide range of different habitat types, then (4) determining which locations maximized the flow of resources to consumers on a daily basis. Under the climatic and environmental conditions thought to have prevailed in this region over the last several thousand years, sites located closest to resources predicted to have been favored by women proved to be the optimal solution most of the time, a result consistent with the actual distribution of late prehistoric archaeological sites identified as residential bases.…”

Explaining prehistoric variation in the abundance of large prey: A zooarchaeological analysis of deer and rabbit hunting along the Pecho Coast of Central California

“…However, the relative abundance of deer in creases dramatically after this component. That the predicted in crease in deer abundance occurred much earlier along the Pecho Coast than elsewhere in western North America (see e.g., Broughton et al, 2008), suggests an important local difference in precipitation, water availability or seasonality; as others have sug gested (see Hockett, 2005;Jones and Waugh, 1997;Zeanah, 2004) such local variability may be more important than large scale trends. The second specific prediction was also met for the Middle-Late Transition component centered at 1000 BP * , which shows significantly fewer deer bones than expected (p < 0.0001) and sig nificantly more rabbit bones than expected (p < 0.0001).…”