Paleoindian Prey Choice

When the ancestors of today’s American Indian, Alaskan Natives, and First Nation peoples migrated to the Americas, the variety and types of animals encountered were very different than those of northeast Asia.  These early migrants had to learn how to hunt and subsist not only in a new land, but also on new plants and animals.  Yet, as is well established, these early American Indians were excellent innovators, and shortly after migrating to the Americas had learned how to flourish in their new land.  What these early American Indians hunted, how they moved across the land, and what their general lifeway pattern looked like has always been of interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, and others interested in the peopling of the Americas.  To investigate these questions, researchers have come up with several ingenious methods, one of which is called “prey choice.”  Prey choice is the examination and analysis of the animals found in archaeological sites (the prey) in order to gain insights into the diet, subsistence technologies, and general lifeway patterns (the choice) of these early American Indians.

Recent research using this method has provided some key insights into the peopling of the Americas and the subsistence patterns of early American Indians who lived during what is called the Paleoindian period (13,500-8,000 years before present).  During the Paleoindian period it has long been argued that American Indian foragers’ diets were quite narrow; groups using Clovis tool technology were thought to subsist almost entirely on mammoths, while later groups using Folsom and subsequent technologies were thought to have hunted mainly bison.  This concept of early American Indians as specialized big-game hunters persisted through the 1960s and 1970s, despite discovery of a few sites showing evidence for use of small game.  Beginning in the late 1980s, however, the view of early American Indians as large mammal hunting specialists began to be questioned for several reasons.  First, studies of modern hunter-gatherers suggested that specialized large mammal hunting strategies were economically unfeasible and possibly even dangerous to the hunters.  Second, models proposing a big-game emphasis on a continental scale ignored regions, such as eastern North America and the Great Basin, where there was little evidence for the exploitation of large game.  Third, early research was influenced by biases in the type of sites (mostly kill and carcass processing sites) and the location where research occurred (primarily in the Great Plains), erroneously pointing toward a specialized hunting model of subsistence.  Finally, large-game hunting is more archaeologically visible than other subsistence activities because the preservation of the bones of large-bodied animals is significantly greater than the remains of small game, thus leading archaeologists to initially conclude that early American Indians hunted large mammals almost exclusively.

Despite these facts arguing for a new understanding, a number of researchers continued to maintain into the late 1980s and early 1990s that large mammal hunting was not only a critical component of early American Indian daily subsistence, but also greatly contributed to their technology, mobility, and land use strategies.  Some even pointed to large-game hunting as a primary causal factor in the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna.

These conclusions, however, can no longer reasonably be supported, and there is now overwhelming evidence arguing that early American Indians, like their modern-day relatives, utilized a wide variety of floral and faunal resources as part of their subsistence pattern.  For example, research by Matthew E. Hill, Jr., at the University of Iowa indicates that different site types provide different perspectives on early American Indian faunal use.  Using data from 60 sites, Hill concluded that early American Indians hunted not only bison and mammoth, but also rabbits, turtles, pronghorn, deer, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs, beavers, snakes, canids, fish, badgers, bears, raccoon, muskrat, and many other species. 

What this evidence reveals is that early American Indian diets were highly environmentally contextualized.  For example, when early American Indians were in the low diversity grasslands of the High Plains and Rolling Hills of the Great Plains, they hunted almost exclusively large fauna, especially bison, for the entire 5,000 years of the Paleoindian period.  This strategy was possible because grassland environments maintained large herds of bison despite drastic environmental change through the Late Quaternary.  However, when early American Indians were in more diverse environments such as alluvial valleys and foothill/mountain environments, a higher diversity of fauna were used.  Although large game continued to be of importance in these environments, other species were also hunted when available.

The empirical evidence overwhelmingly argues that early American Indians relied on a broad, general subsistence pattern during the Paleoindian period.  This overall subsistence pattern continued as other components of these early American Indian lifeway patterns evolved into the Archaic period (8,000-1,000 years before present) and as subsequent generations built upon their ancestors traditions.