Society & Environment

A theoretically grounded model is used to map expectations for teh locations of the earliest intensification across Texas. the absence of agriculture in much of prehistoric Texas versus the widespread adoption of farming in Mesoamerica is explored utilizing a theory of intensification recently proposed by Binford in Constructing Frames of Reference. Availability of either aquatic resources or high quality wild plant resources are expected to delay intensification on plants which might lead to agriculture. Hunter-gatherer population models suggest where intensification processes may occur early in prehistoric sequences. These models are compared with archaeological stable isotope and burned rock midden data from Texas which indicate hunter-gatherers on the Texas coastal plain made substantial use of aquatic resources and that burned rock middens likely reflect intensified use of wild plants. The temporal and spatial distribution of these strategies is consistent with the expectations of the models. This approach may have utility for exploring both the absence as well as the presence of agricultural adaptations through time; however, further research on resource distributions and archaeological indicators of intensification are needed.

A set of four posters surveys Lewis Binford's (1931-2011) contributions to archaeozoology through field work. The organizers of the International Conference on Archaeozoology requested a poster display that would include unpublished material. These posters include a few of Binford's color slides and exerpts from field notebooks from a variety of field contexts (Alaska to Australia, Europe, Africa, and China) from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s. The final poster discusses the potential for further analysis using Binford's 2001 Constructing Frames of Reference and includes information about materials available through the Binford Archive at Truman State University.

This poster demonstrates how to build an input file to calculate Binford's environmental and hunter-gatherer frames of reference using available global data standards and GIS technology. Required input values include latitude, longitude, elevation, distance to the nearest coast in km, soil type, vegetation type, and mean monthly values of temperature and rainfall. All of these data are freely available in global standard data sets (WORLDCLIM: Hijmans et al 2005, World Wildlife Foundation Habitat Types: Olson et al. 2001, Soil Types: FAO-UNESCO 2005 Soil Map, Coast distance: NOAA/NASA 2009) for use as raster files in GIS. Integrating these data with locations of interest through GIS serves to 1) standardize the input data compared to collecting locally available weather station data, 2) eliminate the problem of missing data in some regions, and 3) automize the process of building an input file, making it as easy to compile data for hundreds or thousands of locations as it is for only a few locations. The resulting input file structure can be run through the EnvCalc 2.1 program to calculate Binford's frames of reference so researchers anywhere in the world could use these variables to leverage learning from the archaeological and ethnoarchaeological record.

In the 1980s, Lewis Binford (1931-2011) started an analysis of hunter-gatherer site structure. This analysis was later put on hold in order to organize ethnographic and environmental data to use as frames of reference for the analysis. Although the frames of reference were constructed by 2001, Binford never completed his analysis of site structure. This paper represents an initial attempt to realize Binford's vision of a controlled analysis of site structure at the regional scale using data from the Kalahari. Variables include site area, distances among huts in and between clusters, numbers of occupants, duration of occupation, seasonality, and presence of storage features and food production.

Hunter-gatherer lifeways dominated the Salt Puna of South America for at least 5000 years before domesticated animals and plants appear in the archaeological record. The ruggedness of the landscape (with a baseline elevation of 3300 masl), the low ET and the distribution of resources dependent on a decreasing E-W rainfall gradient surely had an impact on prehistoric landscape use and mobility of ancient hunter-gatherers. In this poster we follow Binford (2001) in arguing there is a link between environmental variables and HG organization.  We use world climatic data to calculate an environmental and hunter-gatherer frame of reference that allows us to create a set of expectations regarding past hunter-gatherers in this remote high-elevation desert. We specifically develop expectations for archaeological hunter-gatherer mobility in terms of number of residential camp moves per year and distance moved annually in residential moves, as well as group size and project these expected properties onto the Salt Puna. Finally, we compare these projections to a current model for HG mobility in the study area, to determine differences and incompatible properties.

In this work, we apply the environmental and ethnographic frames of reference constructed by Binford (2001) and calculated in EnvCalc2.1 in order to generate and evaluate archaeological hypothesis for the central-western area of Chubut Province (Patagonia, Argentina), an area in which archaeological research has recently started. Patagonia is an elongated territory located between 39º W and 55º S in Southern South America. By its shape, it receives an
important oceanic influence which determines the lack of subpolar conditions, tundra and permafrost, expected by its latitude. The regional climate is determined by the westerly winds coupled with precipitation inducedby the western flanks of the Andean Cordillera [by a] 'rainshadow effect'. As a
consequence, a strong east-west gradient is produced, with annual precipitation ranging from of4000 mm on the western slope to 200 in the east. In our study area this gradient determines two biomes:the steppe, represented by Genoa Valley and the forest represented by the Pico Valley. Both valleys are connected and situated at similar latitude.The hunter-gatherer frames of reference are used to develop hypotheses regarding expected variation in subsistence, mobility, and housing across the study region. These expectations will be compared with the archaeological evidence from the region

Occupants of the Great Basin 13- 6 kya cannot be understood by direct analogy with ethnographic Great Basin foragers because they lived in climatic circumstance and at population densities utterly unlike those of recent times. Archaeological evidence dating earlier than 8 kya suggests that hunter-gatherers were highly mobile with hunting oriented lithic technology and lacking milling equipment, but acquired a broad spectrum of faunal prey and tended to camp near wetland environments. Debate about the adaptive implications of these traits often devolves to whether they are best characterized as Paleo-Indian, Paleoarchaic, or Prearchaic in comparison to subsequent Archaic (broad-spectrum foraging) adaptations. At the transition from Early to Middle Holocene, the Great Basin witnessed higher effective temperatures and reduced aquatic resource zones. Most archaeologists agree that the proliferation of milling equipment marks inception of the Archaic, but the relative importance of terrestrial fauna and aquatic resources, and the effects of climatic aridity on human occupation and mobility remain unclear (Grayson 2011).

Here we develop an environmental frame of reference (Binford 2001) to model regional Late Pleistocene through Middle Holocene subsistence and mobility based on climatic variables inferred from paleoenvironmental proxies. Our goal is to develop expectations about the range of hunter-gatherer adaptations feasible under climatic scenarios posed for the Late Pleistocene and Early-to Middle Holocene Great Basin.We proceed in four steps: 1) extrapolate a geographic grid from a global climatic model to capture climatic variability across the Great Basin and compare with weather station records to assess how well the model captures current climate; 2) alter monthly precipitation and temperature to reflect climatic parameters of Bølling-Allerød, Younger Dryas, Early Holocene, and Middle Holocene climatic scenarios, and assess their accuracy against independent paleoenvironmental proxies; 3) predict hunter- gatherer subsistence and mobility under the current climate model and compare to 38 hunter-gatherers groups falling within the Great Basin using the Environmental Calculations program [ENVCALC2.1] (Binford and Johnson. 2014); and 4) generate expectations about hunter-gatherer subsistence and mobility under each of the four paleoclimatic models.