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13 Human Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Food Production Bruce D. Smith 289 uman behavioral ecology and foraging theory offer frameworks for considering and characterizing variation and change in human subsistence patterns, both across a range of environmental gradients and through time (Winterhalder and Smith 2000). Given that the initial domestication of plants and animals and the subsequent development and spread of agricultural economies and landscapes constitutes one of the earth’s most significant environmental transformations, it is not surprising that there has been interest in exploring the utility of these theories and models for opening up new approaches and gaining a better perspective on this major transition in human history. This chapter offers a brief overview of some of the central questions and challenges involved in efforts to employ foraging theory and related behavioral ecology models to better understand domestication and agricultural origins. SCALES OF ANALYSIS AND DATA RESOLUTION REQUIREMENTS Perhaps the most obvious aspect of foraging theory and other behavioral ecology models that sets them apart from the wide range of alternative approaches to understanding change and transition in the archaeological record is their apparent small scale, “fine resolution” context of application , at the individual or small group level, rather than in terms of larger and longer-term societal level adaptive responses to “external pressures.” In their concise and straightforward characterization of optimal foraging theory, for example, Winterhalder and Goland (1997) contrast the diet breadth model with other proposed approaches to explaining domestication and agricultural origins in terms of scale and specificity. They describe most previous explanations as involving “extensive ” variables such as population growth, climate change, and technological innovation, which are generalized and normative, and which operate on the system level: “extensive variables are those measures that summarize population wide, interspecific (community level) or longterm (multi-generational) aspects of things biological ” (Winterhalder and Goland 1997, 126). In contrast, Winterhalder and Goland argue that optimal foraging theory derives considerable theoretical strength from the much smaller or “local” temporal, spatial, and ecosystem scale H on which it is applied. Diet breadth modeling, for example, like foraging approaches in general, involves “intensive variables . . . those that characterize the behavior of an individual at a particular place and time. They refer to the situated properties of the organisms making up ecological sets; they potentially are subject to the direct action of selection” (1997, 126). Identifying the intensive variables of foraging models as being subject to the direct action of selection also suggests that within the framework of foraging theory the choice or selection of plant and animal resources at the local level, i.e. individuals, is potentially open to being predicted on the basis of higher level selection theories and assumptions. This question of the nature and strength of a predictive link between general evolutionary principles of selection and individual diet choice decisions will be considered later in this chapter, within a broader discussion of the necessary care and procedures which should be exercised in any efforts to predict archaeologically situated local events on the basis of general theoretical models or overarching frameworks of expectation. Setting this discussion aside for the moment, the small scale of application of foraging theory warrants closer consideration, both in terms of the importance of clarifying the range of scales within which foraging theory can be employed, and the potential constraints and limitations of archaeological data. Archaeological research is carried out on a range of different social, spatial, and temporal scales of consideration; e.g. individual, family or household, settlement or community, polity, and various higher level sub-regional and regional geographical and cultural contexts, depending upon both the kinds of questions being addressed, and the quality and relative level of resolution of available relevant archaeological information. Within this broad range of different potential scales of archaeological analysis, which are open for consideration and which are the most appropriate to select when attempting to apply foraging theory to questions of diet choice and subsistence change? Winterhalder and Goland (1997) (see above) indicate that foraging theory applies at the scale of individual decisions at a particular time and place, and that this fine-resolution level of analysis carries with it considerable theoretical strength. A number of scholars, however, have cautioned that while foraging models are scaled to address individual decisions, archaeological deposits in contrast represent the accumulated and intermingled traces of many such resource selection events (Grayson and Delpech 1998; Gremillion 2002, 144). An important and as yet unresolved issue, then, is whether the “intensive” variables required...

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