Hunt, gather, garden: faunal exploitation during the adoption of agriculture in the tallgrass prairie

The appearance of agriculture brought profound changes to the technology, social organization, and lifestyles of early farming communities across the globe. From the perspective of hunter-gatherers, the adoption of agriculture carried the risk of starvation if crops failed and other food sources were seasonally unavailable or locally depleted. Why prehistoric peoples adopted agriculture considering this risk is a fundamental question within archaeology. My dissertation research focuses on understanding the role that wild animal resources played toward the speed and scale of the adoption of agriculture, using the tallgrass prairie region of western Iowa as a case study. The tallgrass prairie is a transitional environment between the grasslands of the Great Plains and the deciduous woodlands of the eastern United States. Domesticated plants were introduced to this region during the late Archaic period (ca. 3000-800 B.C.), and gradually incorporated into the diet with increasing intensity throughout the Woodland period (ca. 800 B.C.-A.D. 1200). My research establishes the long-term trends in animal use within this environmental context which may have set the stage for the adoption of, and later reliance upon, plant-based agriculture. Specifically, I examine which animals were hunted by Woodland people, and if they relied on a few species or a wide variety of animals. Evidence of resource stress is identified through the intensity in which large game (bison and deer) carcasses were processed. Finally, I explore the use of pocket gophers as survival food at one important location, the Rainbow site (13PM91).