Documenting subsistence change during the pleistocene/holocene transition: Investigations of paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological data from Dust Cave, Alabama

Abstract

The subsistence practices of early hunter-gatherers are predominantly presented with a familiar gloss: hunters primarily targeted larger game, while gatherers collected available wild plant foods. This treatment obscures the wide variation of foraging practices in which early hunter-gatherers engaged, both in terms of tactics employed and in terms of the resources used. Much of this gloss can be attributed to the paucity of subsistence data available for early foraging groups, particularly in the southeastern United States. Poor preservation conditions yield few instances in which both plant and animal remains are recovered from intact Paleoindian or Early Archaic contexts. This is further exacerbated by the fact that plant and animal data are often not considered in concert, but tend to appear as separate discussions in published materials. © 2010 Springer-Verlag New York.