A seasonal foraging model for food resource utilization in Central California and the Eastern Woodlands

Past human subsistence practices are characterized by long periods of relative stasis and short periods of change. It is these periods of subsistence change that often correlate with major changes in other aspects of human behavior such as social organization and settlement patterns. Until subsistence practices, and in particular periods of subsistence change, are better understood there are limits to our ability to explain broader patterns of culture change. Optimal foraging models have proven useful in explaining human foraging practices; however, past models largely failed to account for the highly seasonal availability of the plant resources used by humans. The transition to food production is one subsistence change that has been difficult to explain because of the time delay between work and consumption This research incorporates a new version of a diet breadth model that accounts for seasonal variability as well as long-term storage and delayed processing by dividing an entire annual cycle into smaller increments and then computing separate diet breadths for each increment over the course of a year.; The two case studies included in this research were chosen because they highlight differences in the use of both wild and domesticated crops. The first case study focused on the region of Monroe County, Indiana as a representative sample of the central Eastern Woodland region and the second case study centered on the resources available in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range near the town of Auburn, California. Both regions have similar suites of plant resources that include nuts and small seeds, however the specific collection and processing costs of the various resources are quite different. Specifically, hickory nuts in the Eastern Woodland case study provided an abundant and low-cost resource that likely led to the earlier increased use of plant resources, and may have facilitated the domestication of small seed crops and the later adoption of maize agriculture. The lack of an abundant resource with high return rates may have delayed the intensive use plant resources in Central California, and, combined with a sub-optimal rainfall pattern, may have been the reason food production was not practiced.