ANTH 9 Lecture 32: Anth 9 - Lecture 32
7 Oct 2020
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Document Summary
Many different ways of life: hunter-gatherer, agriculturalist, subsistence, market, pastoralist. How people live: place different constraints on them, provide different opportunities to them. Aquatic resources tend to be underestimated relative to agriculture in models of the origin of complex societies. Humans are selective in terms of the acquisition of food. A wide variety of materials are examined by various experts. Animal remains: usually hard tissue, bones, teeth, antler, shell, fish, scales, occasionally soft tissue. Plant remains: usually carbonized material, sometimes uncarbonized material, phytoliths. Human remains: bone composition, pathological lesions. What would we like to know about diets. Relatively easy to identify the range of food eaten: sometimes people eat bugs. But the relative contribution of different foods to the diet is difficult to estimate: not everything has an equal chance of preservation and discovery. Can estimate the success of switching to alternative foods if preferred ones were in short supply.
