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Abstract
In northeastern California, variation in late Holocene (5000 Cal BP – Present) artiodactyl (e.g., bison, elk, deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep) hunting has been examined to understand past foraging and land-use practices and related changes in human behavior, including settlement patterns, technological change, costly signaling, large-scale resource intensification, and anthropogenic resource depression—the latter of which has been related to increased levels of territoriality and interpersonal violence. Currently, however, limited research evaluates regional-scale variation in the role of large game hunting on territorial circumscription and interpersonal conflict in the region. To this end, the overarching goals of this dissertation are to build a synthesized regional faunal database as the unit of analysis, identify the drivers (i.e., climatic-ecological change, human behavior, or both) of large game abundances in zooarchaeological assemblages, and assess how these drivers impact human subsistence decisions. I draw on theory and methods from zooarchaeology, paleoecology, behavioral ecology, and spatio-temporal statistical modeling to answer these questions. The results of this work show that increases in relative artiodactyl abundance across the region are directly related to human behavior and expanding human settlement density, with the latter driven by variation in late Holocene climate change. Moreover, I show that interactions between the elevation at which a site is located and increasing social conflict after 2000 Cal BP plays an essential role in human hunting decisions in the region, resulting in distinctive patch use strategies employed by foragers living in high and low elevation settings. Overall, the outcomes of the research presented here provide a valuable framework for analytical methodologies aimed at disentangling the complex interplay between climate, expanding human settlement density, and social conflict that interacted with and influenced subsistence decisions in the past.
