Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Investigating The Effect Of Environmental Variability On Mobility And Territorial Behavior

University Of Texas At San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

Territoriality is fundamental to understanding human societies as it relates to the emergence of property rights, land tenure, warfare, and socioeconomic inequalities. However human societies have not always been territorial and many questions remain as to the timing and conditions under which territoriality emerges. It is only through the discipline of archaeology can social scientists evaluate the emergence of and changes in territoriality across thousands of years. Anthropologists have theorized that territoriality emerges as a trade-off between benefits and risks of defending land using the Economic Defensibility Model (EDM). The EDM will be evaluated through the study of archaeological materials from the Texas Coastal Plain using geochemical methods. This project involves collaboration with The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio. This research contributes to the training of a minority graduate student in archaeological and geochemical methods. It will also contribute to a publicly available geochemical dataset that will be useful to multiple disciplines, including geology, ecology as well as archaeology. The EDM considers resource density, territory size, and modes of defense to posit the conditions under which territoriality emerges. While this model has been effective in understanding ethnographic examples of different types of territoriality, it has yet to be systematically evaluated in archaeological contexts. This project addresses this gap by examining territoriality during the Late Archaic period (2000 BC-AD 800) on the Texas Coastal Plain (TCP). The Late Archaic was a period of climatic amelioration and during this point in time population density peaked as hunter-gatherers made use of freshwater resources, white-tail deer, pecans, and tubers. They returned to central locations for rituals and to bury their dead however, the scale of their population movements is unknown. Researchers argue that as hunter-gatherer populations on the TCP increased, there was a decline in mobility that may have led to increasing territoriality. The investigators will utilize strontium (87Sr/86Sr) stable isotope analysis to evaluate the presence of territoriality. As an ecological tracer, 87Sr/86Sr levels in human bone can potentially tie individuals to particular locations and therefore allow inferences regarding territoriality. The 87Sr/86Sr of tooth enamel of over 50 individuals from the archaeological site of Loma Sandia will be measured. In addition, the bioavailability of 87Sr/86Sr from seven geologic regions in the TCP will be evaluated through examination of modern faunal samples. These datasets will be analyzed to evaluate the degree that humans are tied to particular locations. This project will contribute to the rigorous assessment of the Economic Defensibility Model and advance our understanding of the causes and conditions for the emergence of territoriality.