Survival of periodic subsistence crises is largely dependent on a group memory of past crisis situations and of the strategies appropriate for dealing with the altered environmental conditions. One mechanism utilized by nonliterate societies for the preservation of survival knowledge is its incorporation in oral tradition. As a body of reference knowledge, oral traditions potentially operate ov...

The people of northwestern Alaska have had a long relationship with local populations of Rangifer tarandus. During the last 200 years this relationship has changed from one of subsistence to overexploitation of caribou (the name for wild reindeer in North America), to commercial livestock production of semi domesticated reindeer and now may be returning to a subsistence economy based on caribou...

Reconstructing ancient diets and the use of animals and plants augment our understanding of how humans adapted to different environments. Yunnan Province in southwest China is ecologically and environmentally diverse. During the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, this region was occupied by a variety of local culture groups with diverse subsistence systems and material culture. In this paper, we...

I use cross-cultural ethnographic data to explore the relationship between male and female subsistence labor among hunter-gatherer populations by examining data regarding resource procurement, time allocation, and task differentiation between the sexes relative to dependence on hunted foods. The findings indicate that female foragers generally perform a variety of nonsubsistence collection acti...

We conducted a multi-isotope study of five fifth-century AD cemeteries in modern-day Hungary to determine relationships between nomadic-pastoralist incomers-the historically documented Huns and other nomadic groups-and the sedentary agricultural population of the late Roman province of Pannonia. Contemporary historical sources describe this relationship as adversarial and destructive for the la...

Tooth wear records valuable information on diet and methods of food preparation in prehistoric populations or extinct species. In this study, samples of modern and prehistoric hunger-gatherers and agriculturalists are used to test the hypothesis that there are systematic differences in patterns of tooth wear related to major differences in subsistence and food preparation. Flatness of molar wea...

BACKGROUND Implementation of REDD+ requires measurement and monitoring of carbon emissions from forest degradation in developing countries. Dry forests cover about 40 % of the total tropical forest area, are home to large populations, and hence often display high disturbance levels. They are susceptible to gradual but persistent degradation and monitoring needs to be low cost due to the low pot...

Perceptions of climate change by rural communities are centered on observations of variations in temperature and rainfall patterns supported by observations and projections on climate alterations in the form of increased temperatures and scarce rainfall by scientists worldwide. The present study documented perceptions of climate variation and the community’s ability to adapt to climate change h...

Debates about the importance of marsh resources to prehistoric hwnan subsistence in the western Great Basin are longstanding. Recent questions regarding the natural vs.cultural origin offISh remains in lakeside archaeological sitesjllrther impede understanding of ancient subsistence patterns. Taphonamic study of a huge assemblage of tui chub (Gila bicolor) remains from an archaeological site in...

South African agriculture is comprised of mainly two categories of farmers -the subsistence farmers in the former homeland areas and the large-scale commercial (mainly white) farmers. This is in contrast with the situation in many other countries in the world where one would find a whole range of farm sizes, ranging from the very small or subsistence farmer to the very large farmer/agribusiness...