Resource risk and stability in the zooarchaeological record: the case of Pueblo fishing in the Middle Rio Grande, New Me
- PDF / 920,764 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 46 Downloads / 188 Views
(2020) 12:248
ORIGINAL PAPER
Resource risk and stability in the zooarchaeological record: the case of Pueblo fishing in the Middle Rio Grande, New Mexico Jonathan Dombrosky 1 Seth D. Newsome 2
&
Alexi C. Besser 2 & Emma A. Elliott Smith 3 & Cyler Conrad 1,4 & Laura Pagès Barceló 2 &
Received: 22 May 2020 / Accepted: 4 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Disarticulated fish remains are frequently recovered from late preHispanic and early historic archaeological sites in the Middle Rio Grande basin of central New Mexico, but they are rare during earlier time periods. Increased aquatic habitat quality brought on by wetter climatic conditions may have impacted Ancestral Pueblo foraging goals related to risk minimization, leading to an uptick in fish exploitation. Wetter stream conditions can increase the number of different energy channels that help support fish populations and increase ecological stability, which makes fish less risky to pursue for human foragers. Here, we illustrate how to identify stable ecological communities in the archaeological record using stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values of fish bones recovered from archaeological sites in the Middle Rio Grande. We find that energy derived from terrestrial C4 plants—a stabilizing “slow” allochthonous energy source—was important for the Middle Rio Grande aquatic food web during the late preHispanic/early historic period. This result suggests that fish populations were supported by a broader resource base and were thus more stable and less risky to pursue for Ancestral Pueblo people. Keywords Risk-sensitive foraging . Ecological stability . Stable isotope analysis . Ancestral Pueblo . Desert fishes
Introduction Optimal foraging theory (OFT; Stephens and Krebs 1986) and energy maximization logic have been instrumental in examining the relationship between food acquisition and cultural change in the zooarchaeological record across the globe This article is part of the Topical Collection on Do good things come in small packages? Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01193-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Jonathan Dombrosky [email protected] 1
Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
2
Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
3
Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA
4
Envrionmental Protection and Compliance, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA
(Broughton 1994; Broughton and Cannon 2010; Jones 2004; Stiner Mary et al. 2000). One of the main ways that zooarchaeologists have used energy maximization logic is to identify resource depression, a topic at the center of the OFT literature in zooarchaeology from 1997 to 2013 (Jones and Hurley 2017). There are different types of resource depression (Charnov et al. 1976; Wolverton et al. 2012), but
Data Loading...
