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Before Farming 2008/2 article 1
Middle Holocene behavioural strategies in the Americas
An introduction to a series of articles in this and subsequent issues of Before Farming 2008
Raven Garvey
Department of Anthropology, University of California
Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, USA
rgcarper@ucdavis.edu
Adolfo Gil
Departamento de Antropología, Museo de Historia Natural de San Rafael
Mendoza, Parque Mariano Moreno, 5600, San Rafael, Mendoza, Argentina
adolfogil@arqueologiamendoza.com
Gustavo Neme
Departamento de Antropología, Museo de Historia Natural de San Rafael
Mendoza, Argentina
gustavoneme@arqueologiamendoza.com
ref: Before Farming 2008/2 article 2
A behavioural ecological approach to a proposed middle Holocene occupational gap
Raven Garvey
Department of Anthropology, University of California
Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA
rgcarper@ucdavis.edu
Keywords: Argentina, behavioural ecology, climate change, middle Holocene, occupational hiatus
Abstract
Relative to other periods, there are very few recorded sites of middle Holocene age in Mendoza Province, Argentina. This analysis weighs the preliminary results of a regional study in Mendoza against three possible explanations for the small number of middle Holocene sites: poor visibility, reduced population density and behavioural adaptation. While changes in visibility and population density cannot be dismissed, evidence suggests that the scarcity of mid-Holocene sites in Mendoza reflects changed patterns of land and resource use triggered by climate change. Archaeological data from the region fit the predictions of Charnov’s marginal value theorem and a cost-benefit model of lithic procurement, and suggest that hunter-gatherer groups curtailed their mobility during the middle Holocene, producing a more cryptic archaeological record.
ref: Before Farming 2008/2 article 3
White-tailed deer harvest pressure & within-bone nutrient exploitation during the mid- to late Holocene in southeast Texas, USA
Steve Wolverton, Lisa Nagaoka, Julie Densmore, & Ben Fullerton
University of North Texas, Department of Geography, Institute of Applied Sciences
PO Box 305279, Denton, TX 76203-5279, USA
wolverton@unt.edu
Keywords: Harvest pressure, body-size, mortality patterns, ungulate prey, within-bone nutrients
Abstract
Human population size and density increased in many areas of eastern North America after the mid-Holocene. As predators, human foragers relied heavily on ungulate prey for food in many areas of the world during prehistory. In southeast Texas, changes in foraging adaptations relate to broader subsistence and population trends. A large, well-preserved archaeological faunal assemblage that spans much of the second half of the Holocene from the Eagle’s Ridge site (41CH252) indicates that harvest pressure and carcass exploitation of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) intensified through time following predictions framed under two theoretical models. The first model summarises effects of changes in harvest pressure and/or habitat productivity on prey population age structure and body size. Under harvest pressure age structures should become juvenile dominated expressing relatively steep survivorship, and ontogenetic growth rate of prey should increase. Habitat productivity affects ontogenetic growth rate but not proportional age structure in a prey population. The second model uses proxy measures of fragmentation to study exploitation of within-bone nutrients from white-tailed deer bones. Extent of fragmentation increases as marrow exploitation increases and intensity of fragmentation increases as grease exploitation intensifies. At Eagle’s Ridge multiple lines of evidence related to the two models indicate that as human population density increased through time white-tailed deer were harvested at a higher rate.
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ref: Before Farming 2008/2 article 4
Bringing the Kalahari debate to the mountains: late first millennium AD hunter-gatherer/farmer interaction in highland Lesotho
Peter Mitchell
School of Archaeology, University of Oxford
St Hugh's College, Oxford, OX2 6LE, UK
peter.mitchell@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk
Ina Plug
Department of Anthropology & Archaeology, University of South Africa
Box 392, UNISA, 0003, South Africa
plugc@mweb.co.za
Geoff Bailey
Department of Archaeology, University of York
King's Manor, York, YO1 7EP, UK
gb502@york.ac.uk
Stephan Woodborne
CSIR Natural Resources and the Environment
PO Box 395, Pretoria, 0001, South Africa
swoodbor@csir.co.za
Keywords: Kalahari debate, Maloti-Drakensberg region, domestic livestock, 'neolithic',
farmer/hunter-gatherer interaction
Abstract
Archaeological debates in southern Africa over the implications of hunter-gatherer interactions with farmers and herders have hitherto tended to privilege two regions, the Kalahari, where the eponymous Kalahari debate itself first took shape, and the southwestern part of South Africa's Western Cape Province. The Maloti-Drakensberg region has largely been ignored in these discussions except in the work of Pieter Jolly, who has long argued for the importance of cultural influences from Bantu-speaking groups on its plentiful rock paintings. Recently, Jolly (2007) has widened this discussion to examine the significance of cattle imagery in Bushman rock art within the context of ethnohistoric evidence for the keeping of domestic livestock by Bushmen in many parts of southern Africa. In this paper, we present new evidence that strongly suggests a surprising antiquity for this practice. Excavations at Likoaeng in highland Lesotho have produced the remains of domesticated sheep and cattle, some of them directly dated to the late first millennium AD, a thousand years before the local establishment of agropastoralist settlements. We consider the implications of this evidence and of finds from the same context, again directly dated, for hunter-gatherers accessing iron and agropastoralist pottery. After exploring a range of alternatives, we conclude that the most likely explanation of the Likoaeng finds is that they indicate that some hunter-gatherers in highland Lesotho were keeping sheep and cattle some 1200 years ago. We argue for a systematic programme of direct radiocarbon dating of domestic livestock remains in other archaeological sequences to establish how widespread and continuous this 'neolithic' (sensu Sadr 2003) economy may have been in both time and space. We also use the Likoaeng evidence to warn against generalising ethnohistoric observations of the Maloti-Drakensberg Bushmen, including Qing's famous comments on the meaning of some of their paintings (Orpen 1874), without taking account of what increasingly seems to have been a dynamic history over the past 2000 years.
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© Western Academic & Specialist Press Ltd 2008
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