The Study of Past Subsistence Practices and Economy
What’s the Big Deal with Subsistence and Economy?
Who Cares what People Ate?

Culture as a System with Subsystems

Culture and the Environment

Importance to Archaeological Studies
•	Evidence is ubiquitous in most archaeological settings
•	Close interrelationship between the natural environment and human subsistence practices
•	Environment shapes subsistence choices
•	Cultures modify the environment
•	Society’s subsistence organization tends to pattern other aspects of culture, e.g. population size, density, mobility, etc.

Direct Evidence of Past Subsistence Activities
•	Faunal Analysis (animal remains)
•	Floral Analysis (plant remains)
•	Coprolite Analysis
•	Biochemical Evidence
•	Human biology
•	Identification of cooking residues

Analysis of Animal Remains
•	In essence, the identification and characterization of the animal remains exploited by the human community.
•	Species utilized
•	Relative and absolute quantities
•	Related information:
•	Seasonality
•	Hunting or management practices
•	Processing strategies
•	Territorial movements
Limitations
•	Preservation: bone preserves poorly in acid soils
•	Incomplete recovery: small or broken up bones may not be recovered or identifiable
•	Incomplete representation: assemblage recovered at any given site may not represent the entire range of uses.
Interpreting Faunal Remains
•	What do the bone counts mean in human terms?
•	Estimating minimum number of individuals represented by the assemblage (MNI)
•	Estimating meat weight equivalents.
•	Assessing meat utility index.
Anza, Level 1 (6000 BC)
Analysis of Plant Remains
•	Analysis of preserved (most commonly carbonized) plant remains, including seeds, stems, cobs, leaves, nutshells, etc.
•	Essentials: 
•	Identification of exploited species
•	Relative and absolute proportions of plant food remains
•	Related information:
•	Seasonality
•	Cultivation/harvesting practices
•	Field location and fallowing
•	Territorial exploitation
Limitations
•	Preservation: have to occur in a context that promotes carbonization, or  that otherwise retards decay (dry caves, cold water, etc.)
•	Incomplete recovery: seeds often not collected, require special techniques (like flotation) for recovery
•	Incomplete representation: not all species are equally likely to be carbonized, etc.

Interpretation
•	Was a represented species actually used as a food source (or was it a weed)?
•	Was a given plant domesticated?
•	Was a given species grown/harvested locally or was it obtained through trade?
•	Difficult to estimate role of vegetal remains in diet solely from plant remains or to compare meat and vegetal contribution to diet.
The Study of Coprolites
•	In Essence: identification of plant and animal material in human fecal remains
•	Related information:
•	Dietary mix (what foods were eaten together)
•	Seasonality
•	Exploitation territory
•	Human parasitology

Limitations
•	Circumstances of preservation so restrictive that remains will typically represent only a single season or subsistence posture.
•	Difficult to compare with macro-floral or faunal evidence
•	Strongly affected by food processing technique (ground vs. corn on the cob)
Coprolites from the Tehuacan Valley (Puebla, Mexico)
•	Coprolites recovered from a series of upland cave sites
•	Sequence spanning 6500 BC to AD 1540
•	Numerous traces of wild plants; such as maguey, foxtail millet and some sun flower.
•	Surprises:
•	Little to no evidence for corn
•	Much more meat than expected
•	Results strongly contrast with historically-known pattern of heavy corn consumption with little meat.  What happened?
Biochemical Evidence
•	Trace elements and isotopes in human bone
•	Identification of organic materials in cooking residues
Human Biochemistry
•	Strontium: decreases by an order of magnitude as it passes up through the food chain.  As such, the more meat in the diet, the less strontium.
•	Carbon 12/13: isotopic fractionation by tropical grasses, such as corn.  In corn, 13C is enriched. As such, the more corn, the greater the skew toward 13C.
Indirect Evidence for Past Subsistence Practices
•	Useful when primary evidence is unavailable from lack of preservation or excavation.
•	Used to ‘calibrate’ direct evidence (compensate for bias or uncertainty)
•	Provides a more systematic perspective on society’s subsistence activities and the overall organization of the society.
Categories of Indirect Subsistence Evidence
•	Material Culture and Technology
•	What kinds of tools and subsistence technologies represented
•	Evidence for use wear on tools
•	Structures and features relevant to subsistence
•	Environmental Approaches
•	Environmental reconstruction
•	Site catchments
•	Site content catchments
•	Site systems
Material Culture and Subsistence
•	Implements related to hunting, fishing, farming (where were they used and discarded).
•	Implements relating to food preparation and consumption.
•	Implements and features related to food storage
Use Wear on Tools and Implements
•	Macro- and microscopic abrasions and wear on working edges of tools can often be connected to use on specific materials.
•	Sickle gloss on stone tools
•	Wear from: bone, wood, wet hide, dry hide, soft tissue.
•	Abrasion and location of burning on ceramics
•	Surviving residues: blood, fat, fiber, etc.
Food Preparation and Consumption
•	Nature of food preparation
•	Food serving and consumption
•	Size and composition of group that is eating together
Food Storage
•	Storage Facilities
•	Pits, caches, granaries, store houses
•	Location, capacity, content, season of use
•	Nature of control and ownership of facilities
•	Organization of Production
•	Individual household or community wide
•	character of coordination

Environmental Approaches
•	Reconstructing past environments
•	Pollen and macro-botanical remains (e.g. charcoal identification)
•	Geomorphology
•	Paleoclimatology (dendro-climatology)
•	Site Location
•	Site catchments
•	Site content catchments
•	Settlement systems
Site Catchment Analysis
•	Rationale:  The location of sites on the landscape is not random, but rather reflects the resources that were exploited from these locations.
•	Used to  understand patterns of resource exploitation
•	Often used when site locations are known, but when sites have not been excavated, or did not yield direct evidence for subsistence activities
Procedures for Site Catchment Analysis
•	Construct model of paleo-landscape at time of occupation
•	Determine economic potential of individual site catchments
•	Map survey (circles, 1-3 km agriculturists, 4-10 km for hunter-gatherers)
•	Walking survey (circles based on travel times, 1 hr for agriculturists, 3 hr for hunter-gatherers)
Big Village Site Catchment
Stanton Site Catchment
Limitations
•	Approach assumes that site location is principally determined by a single strong (economic) factor.
•	Balancing multiple factors (least worst location for exploiting multiple resources)
•	Sites may be located relative to critical but limited resources
•	Non-economic factors (e.g. warfare)
Limitations
(continued)
•	Assessment still tied to modern landscape
•	Requires correct interpolation of past environment and economic potential of resources.
•	Distorting effect of modern construction and land use

Site Content Catchment
•	Premise:	Rather than assuming that location reflects resource importance, identify the nearest source of materials recovered from the site to understand site location.
•	Turns site catchment analysis on its head
•	Requires that specific sites have already been excavated.
Site Content Catchments
•	Procedures:
•	Identify acquisition points for differing categories of material recovered from the site (including both subsistence goods, raw materials for durable goods, and exotics).
•	Consider source distances at a variety of critical distances from the site (1 hour, 1 day, etc.)
Site Content Analysis
Advantages
•	Permits an assessment of the normal site catchment analysis premise
•	Highlights discontinuities:
•	More intensive exploitation of more distant resources: why?
•	Highlights particular exploitive focus of site
•	Starting point for understanding relationship between sites in a settlement system.
Multi-Site Approaches
•	Single sites may provide a biased view of past subsistence activities
•	Most hunter gatherers follow a complex schedule of movements matched to the shifting pattern of seasonal available resources.
•	Any single site will represent only one part of the complex annual round.
•	A multi-site approach highlights the seasonal character of resource utilization.
The Settlement System
A series of locations of human activity that are inter-related and derive from the same cultural entity
Advantages of Settlement System  Approach
•	Possible to account for full annual cycle of subsistence activities.
•	Ability to ascertain the pattern of seasonal mobility employed by past society
•	e.g. forager vs. collector strategies
•	Ability to work from subsistence organization to larger social and economic relations.

The Annual Round
In most environments, societies  exploit a sequence of seasonally available resources.
Seasonally Available Resources
•	Poses an ecological problem that all societies must solve.
•	Many potential solutions
•	Risk minimizing
•	Return maximizing
•	Each strategy imposes organizational constraints on society
•	Each strategy has predictable spatial and temporal patterning that can be observed archaeologically.

Mobility Strategies
•	Forager Strategy
•	Relatively mobile base camps
•	Located to maximize access to specific seasonal resource
•	Frequent residential moves
•	More specialized extractive tools at each site.

•	Collector Strategy
•	Relatively permanent base camps
•	Located to maximize access to a series of resources
•	Fewer residential moves
•	More generalized equipment present
•	Logistically  organized extractive camps
•	ephemeral
•	special purpose
Economy and Society
The constraints imposed by specific economic strategies provides a useful entry point for the analysis of the larger social system.