Prehistoric Anthropogenic Impacts to Local and Regional Faunas Are Not Ubiquitous

Many zooarchaeologists have presented evidence indicating that pre­ h i toric forag rs h ad Significant impacts on faunas . The evidence has prompted the suggestion that anth ropogenic impacts are ubiqui tous. In many times and places humans indeed influenced local faunal communities. Research should not, however, be initia ted with the p reconceived notion that evidence of th il t influence wiIJ be fou nd in every collection of faunal r mains studied. Some studies indicate minima l human influence and suggest that fa ilure to find c, i­ dence of human influence can be the res ult of methOdological artifacts, use of data of insufficient (spatiotemporal) resolution, and lise of data representing cases in which humans had minimal inJ:1uence on faunas. Reasons for lack of influence include al'ci1aeological monitoring perspective and harvest of indi­ viduals whose abundance does not influence pI' y availability. Ecologically inclined archaeologists, or what we might today label thnobiologist , ethnobotanists, zo archaeologists, and the like, have long been interested in the interactions between hLUnan and nonhuman organisms. Begin­ ning in the 1970s, some of th se researchers adopted versions of optimal foraging theory (e.g., Krebs and Davies 1978; Pyke et al. 1977) to assi t with understanding and explaining the interactions (Bayham 1979; Earle and Christenson 1980; Win­ terhalder and Smith 1981). Foraging theory ultimately came to provide a source of mod Is that explicitly relate var iables manifest by predators and thei r prey and the in teractions of the two (Broughton and O'Connell 1999). The numerous studies that have to date beel perfom1ed under the guidance of foraging theory The Archaeology of Anthropogenic Environments, edited by Rebecca M. Dean. enter for Archae o­ logical rnves tigations, Occasional Paper No. 37. © 2010 by the Board of Trustees, Southern IlIinois University. All rights reserved. rSBN 978-0-88104-094-4. 204 (Stephens an behavioral e( have providE archaeology . By thela prey interact behavioral e( geograp hic a J,met ki 1997 et al. 1999; S:i ers seem to i crage, that ill when in the times and pL degree, I sug notion that \ of falmal r n several rease To date, within the z growing (Bu 2003a, 2004a as some earl lar instance J for observec brand t and J Martin and ~ find ings of r growing wei nificant inflt are backed t are studies i found and, : cases where to me that tl influence on reveal how I such influen