A biological reconstruction of mobility patterns at the foraging to farming transition in the American Southwest (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico)

The Holocene trend in increasing femoral gracilization accompanying the transition from mobile foraging to sedentary agricultural lifeways is well documented in the biomechanical literature. As relative mobility is a useful concept for understanding patterning in economic organization, biomechanical principles were applied to the femora of incipient Southwestern farmers to clarify the processes by which early agricultural systems developed. In order to infer economic status, gender-specific locomotor behavior was quantified and compared to illuminate patterning in the sexual division of labor. Were these groups committed agriculturalists occupying settled villages, or were they seasonally mobile, using agriculture as a buffer to wild resources?; Skeletal series representing pre-agricultural and late agricultural systems served as a baseline for comparison for the early agricultural sample. The mobile pre-agriculturalists (represented by 19 males, 23 females) traversed the southwest Texas landscape where agriculture was never incorporated into the economy prehistorically. The early agriculturalists (represented by 14 males, 7 females) inhabited southeastern Arizona when agriculture is thought to have been in the earliest stages. The sedentary late agriculturalists (represented by 42 males, 34 females) resided at a large aggregated pueblo in central New Mexico.; Cross-sectional data derived from computed tomographic scans quantified mobility patterns among the groups sampled. Two-way ANOVAs compared femoral property values across sex and subsistence for Ix/Iy, a proxy for locomotor behavior. Significant differences were seen for sex (p = .0011) and subsistence (p < .0001). Mobility decreased as dependence on maize increased.; The sexual division of labor was impacted in the early agricultural phase. Behaviors requiring high mobility persisted in males. Female mobility dramatically declined at the advent of plant domestication, reflecting women's role in underwriting the costs of agriculture.