Christopher Morgan

MODELING MODES OF HUNTER-GATHERER FOOD STORAGE

Abstract Analyses of the capacity and rates of different acorn storage techniques employed by the Western Mono of California’s Sierra Nevada during the very late Holacene indicate hunter-gatherers store food in at least three main modes: central-place storage, dispersed caching, and dispersed bulk caching. The advantage of caching modes over central-place ones is that they entail faster storage rates and thus the chance to maximize storage capacity when seasonality and scheduling conflicts limit storing opportunities. They also result in predictable stores of acorn separate from winter population aggregations but oftentimes near seasonally occupied camps. Central-place storage thus appears most directly related to coping with single-year seasonal variability in environmental productivity and sedentary overwintering strategies; caching, and especially bulk caching, with multi-year environmental unpredictability, overwintering and seasonal residential moves. Storage thus appears to generally develop as a response to seasonality and unpredictable environmental productivity, but its various forms are conditioned mainly by how they articulate with different mobility types. Complex Mono storage behaviors, however, were associated with regionally low population densities and relatively uncomplicated social structures nonetheless characterized by chiefs who maintained their positions by throwing feasts of stored acorn. The connections between storage, population density, and sociocultural complexity thus appear less direct and predicated on specific sociopolitical circumstance. Recognizing different modes of hunter-gatherer storage is consequently critical to assessing the roles ecology, mobility, group size, and social distinctions play in the development of disparate storage behaviors.

The Transition to Agriculture at Dadiwan, People’s Republic of China

Recent excavations at the Dadiwan site in the western Loess Plateau, Gansu Province, People’s Republic of China (PRC), document the first continuous foraging-to-farming sequence in North China. The Dadiwan occupation began at about 80,000 BP and became regular by about 60,000 BP, probably before the arrival or evolution of modern Homo sapiens in North China. This record spans the transitions from nonintensive to intensive hunting and gathering and from intensive hunting and gathering to low-level Laoguantai food production and finally intensive Late Banpo, Neolithic agriculture. The intensive hunter-gatherer adaptation from which Dadiwan millet agriculture evolved did not develop at Dadiwan itself. Instead, it came south with intensive hunter-gatherer groups migrating out of the arid deserts north of the Yellow River, where the late Pleistocene–early Holocene North China Microlithic was common.

HIGH-ALTITUDE HUNTER-GATHERER RESIDENTIAL OCCUPATIONS IN WYOMING'S WIND RIVER RANGE*

High Rise Village is a hunter-gatherer residential site containing at least 52 house features at a mean elevation of 3200 m in Wyomings Wind River Range. Fifteen radiocarbon dates place site occupation(s) between 4500 and 150 cal BP. Though the 4500 cal BP dates likely result from an old wood problem, dates between 2800 and 150 BP appear more sound, particularly those between 1500 and 500 cal BP. Comparison with other high-altitude residential site radiocarbon dates shows a trend of earlier high-altitude residential occupations to the east of the Great Basin. This has important implications regarding Great Basin-Rocky Mountain culture histories, in particular by calling into question both the Numic Spread hypothesis and the relationship of the site to Rocky Mountain-High Plains hunter-gatherer residential patterns. More importantly, these data emphasize the roles medieval climate and regional population densities may have played in conditioning late Holocene high-altitude hunter-gatherer lifeways across western North America.

Glacial cycles and Palaeolithic adaptive variability on China's Western Loess Plateau

Intensive research on Chinas Western Loess Plateau has located 63 Palaeolithic deposits, which together allow the authors to present a general model of hominin occupation from 80 000 to 18 000 years ago. Tools, subsistence and settlement correlate nicely with the climate: the warm wet MIS3 seeing expansion and more organised acquisition of quartz, and the Late Glacial Maximum that followed, a reduction in human presence but possibly an increase in ingenuity.

Late-Holocene paleoclimate and treeline fluctuation in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, USA

This study presents evidence for treeline advance in the central Rocky Mountains, United States, between 1800 and 800 cal. yr BP. This evidence was generated by systematic survey, sampling, and accelerator-mass spectrometer (AMS) dating of remnant Pinus albicaulis above the modern treeline ecotone of Union Peak, in the Wind River Range of western Wyoming. The survey identified 257 tree remnants, of which AMS dates were generated on 15 samples. Based on AMS results, it appears that treeline was approximately 100 m higher in elevation and covered an additional 1 km of horizontal distance for approximately a millennium, 1800–800 cal. yr BP. These findings are surprising given the tendency of remnant forests across the region to date to the middle Holocene but are consistent with regional evidence for increases in effective moisture that are contemporaneous with the Union Peak treeline advance. The age of death for most of the sampled trees occurred, however, near 800 cal. yr BP, 200 or more years prior to the onset of the type of regional and hemispheric temperature decreases that might be expected to result in treeline decline. Given the contemporaneity of the Union Peak treeline decline with a substantial regional megadrought 820–780 cal. yr BP, it is hypothesized that declining moisture availability played a fundamental role in this phenomenon. If true, the late-Holocene advance and subsequent decline of treeline on Union Peak would emphasize the role effective moisture plays in the complex interactions between temperature, precipitation, and local-scale factors conditioning treeline elevation across the central Rocky Mountain region.

Optimal Foraging Patterns in the Sierra Nevada, Alta California

Abstract Western Mono acorn caches in the south-central Sierra Nevada are distributed in five km radii around central place winter settlements corresponding to predicted distributions, taking into account labor and travel costs associated with caching. Caches more than five km from winter settlements are distributed in a manner facilitating spring residential moves. These data indicate an efficient foraging and caching pattern geared towards maximizing storage capacity around winter settlements while at the same time fostering substantial seasonal group mobility. Because acorn caching was traditionally womens labor in Mono society, this situation clearly demonstrates that womens economic pursuits not only sustained Mono populations through the winter, but also facilitated seasonal residential moves essential to exploiting a patchy Sierran resource base. Because womens labor underwrote so much of the Mono economy, it also evinces a case where efficient womens foraging paid for ostensibly inefficient, status-seeking mens behaviors, such as trade and perhaps prestige hunting. This division of labor, and the differential prestige associated with mens versus womens pursuits, illustrates how attributes of sociocultural complexity can develop in relatively small foraging societies, ultimately suggesting that similar patterns may hold for the evolution of complex social systems throughout late prehistoric and contact period California.

The North China Nanolithic

Robert L. Bettinger , Christopher Morgan, and Loukas Barton This chapter presents a very simple argument: that technology in general, and lithic technology in particular, can shed critical light on conditions surround-ing and contributing to major behavioral innovations, in this case the origin of agriculture. There are probably as many views on the subject as papers, but there is a fairly clear divide between those who argue that agriculture evolves under conditions of scarcity – among them Binford ( 1968 ), Bar-Yosef ( 1998 ), Childe ( 1951 ), and others (e.g., Moore et al. 2000 )), and those who argue that it evolves under conditions of plenty (Braidwood and Howe 1960 ; Price and Gebauer 1995 :7–9). The “conditions of plenty” view is prominent in discussions of the emergence of millet agriculture in North China (Barton 2009 ) and specifi cally the argument that, in common with nearly all early experiments with food production , millet farming developed among complex, “affl uent” hunter-gatherers living in large, permanent settlements in highly productive riparian and lacustrine settings that off ered a rich variety of wild plants and animals (Crawford 2006 :91; Smith 1995 ). This view portrays exper-iments with millet farming as solidifying a position of strength, increasing the yield and reliability of an already important staple in an already intensive and highly successful hunting-and-gathering economy (Smith 1995 :136–137). Lu ( 2006 ), on the other hand, advocates the alternative “conditions of scar-city” view. Observing no archaeological evidence that China’s fi rst farmers were sedentary and that, in contradiction to the abundance argument, agri-culture arrived relatively late in the areas of greatest natural plant and animal

Obsidian conveyance and late prehistoric hunter-gatherer mobility as seen from the high Wind River Range, Western Wyoming

Sampling 16 of 52 house features at High Rise Village (HRV; 48FR5891), a large residential locus at 3,273 m (10,720 ft) elevation in Wyomings Wind River Range produced 25 AMS dates, 23 diagnostic projectile points, 148 obsidian artifacts (mostly retouch debris) as well as abundant chert debitage, small quantities of faunal bone, and groundstone milling equipment. Based on AMS, projectile point, and obsidian hydration data, the sites lodges appear to have been occupied on a sporadic basis mainly between 2,300 and 850 cal BP. Source provenance determination made via X-ray fluorescence spectrometry indicates that most of the obsidian at the site originated in Jackson Hole and secondarily is from Yellowstone Plateau sources, suggesting a Late Prehistoric residentially-mobile, seasonal, and elevationally transhumant settlement system focused on the Jackson Hole area. GIS-based assessments of the costs of procuring the obsidian found at HRV suggests, however, that though economic considerations certainly played a principal role in determining obsidian conveyance decisions, other factors such as social or cultural dynamics may have conditioned the preference for Yellowstone sources over eastern Idaho sources, ultimately suggesting that social boundaries played a role in generating the different toolstone conveyance zones seen in the region during the Late Prehistoric.

Late Prehistoric High-Altitude Hunter-Gatherer Residential Occupations in the Argentine Southern Andes

ABSTRACT Test excavations were conducted at Risco de los Indios (RDLI), a site at 2480 masl with 29 residential features and a well-developed midden containing abundant floral, faunal, lithic, and ceramic materials. Analyses indicate the site was intensively used ca. 500 cal b.p. as a residential base for groups focused on hunting guanaco, supplemented by locally-available wild flora and fauna as well as domestic beans transported from the lowlands. Ceramic and obsidian artifacts indicate these groups were highly mobile and in contact with groups on the eastern and western margins of the Andes. These patterns compare favorably to those seen in the region’s other high altitude villages. It appears that the development of these patterns began with population increase and economic intensification in the lowlands ca. 2000 cal b.p. and that the move to slightly lower elevation settings like RDLI may have been conditioned by the onset of the Little Ice Age.

Structured Tumult: A Review Forum for Robert L. Bettinger's Book, Orderly Anarchy: Sociopolitical Evolution in Aboriginal California

Select at random an issue of American Antiquity from the past 15 years. Chances are good that you will find at least one article or report in the table of contents that focuses on the archaeology of California. Recent research in the Golden State and adjacent regions has been highly influential in two main areas: the archaeology of prehistoric hunter-gatherers and innovative historic archaeology brought to bear on the past few centuries. One might argue that the specialists in the historic period of California have been truly at the forefront of general anthropological and archaeological theory, while those focused on precontact California have been relatively satisfied with a long-cherished and comfortable package of theory that leans heavily—as hunter-gatherer archaeology nearly always does—on cultural ecology and behavioral ecology. While some archaeologists grumble that they do not need any stinking theory for their job at hand, the truth is that every time we load up the field gear in the truck, sort through a tray of artifacts in the lab, write up that overdue report, or critique someone else’s work, we are using archaeological theory. As many have pointed out, everything we think or do with regard to archaeology is based on theoretical assumptions and models. The point of this is to stress the importance of Orderly Anarchy: Sociopolitical Evolution in Aboriginal California, by Robert L. Bettinger. This work promises to be a catalyst for California archaeology and ethnography for decades to come. Most California archaeologists will find that whatever problems they are working on will fit squarely into what Bettinger writes about in this book. He brings together nearly all of the topics over which California specialists grapple under a single theoretical model, and this is perhaps unprecedented. In response, the journal California Archaeology hereby establishes its own new practice, its first book review forum. This format provides a more thorough consideration of the significance and impact of Bettinger’s book than would be