Meat at the origins of agriculture: faunal use and resource pressure at the origins of agriculture in the Northern U.S. Southwest

The transition from a hunting and gathering to a farming lifestyle is an important historical and archaeological topic. In the U.S. Southwest specifically, the Basketmaker II (BM II) time period (1500 B.C. to A.D. 500) marks the entrance of maize-based agriculture into the region. Most attention regarding the BM II diet has thus focused on the use of domesticated plant resources, while the economic importance of wild animals has been less systematically studied. This project seeks to redress this imbalance by synthesizing the faunal data from 31 BM II sites to investigate how BM II communities across the northern Southwest utilized wild animal resources. Most specifically, this project will look at how the diet of the region's first farmers varied over time and across space, considering how environmental change, population density, and length of site occupation may have impacted these patterns.