Archaeofaunal Diversity and Broad Spectrum Diets in Late Paleolithic Southwest Europe

Abstract

Chapter 4 showed that subsistence strategies from Late Paleolithic Southwest Europe differed by region. If diets broadened in Southwest Europe at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition, it seems they did so regionally. Zooarchaeological studies focused on specific sites and/or localities support this hypothesis, both descriptively and quantitatively: many have observed broad spectrum diets in the earliest Upper Paleolithic in the Mediterranean bioclimatic region of Iberia, while in southern France, some suggest broader diets appear in response to the Bolling/Allerod warming around 13 kya BP. In Euro-Siberian Iberia there may be increasing diet breadth in early Holocene, though there is evidence of resource intensification much earlier. In this chapter, I use the richness, evenness, and nestedness of archaeological faunas to explore the if, when, how, and why of increasing diet breadth in Late Paleolithic Southwest Europe.