Dietary evenness, prey choice, and human–environment interactions

Abstract

Although measures of evenness of archaeological faunas are increasingly used in zooarchaeological analyses, the widely accepted hypothesis that increasing evenness should indicate increasing dietary breadth has not been tested. In this paper, I examine three factors that can contribute to changing evenness values—changing encounter rates with high-ranked prey types, changing diet breadth, and similarity between the return rates of the highest-ranked resources—and discuss ways of controlling the latter two factors. I then test the “evenness hypothesis” using ethnographic data collected by Smith [E.A. Smith, Evolutionary Ecology and the Analysis of Human Foraging Behavior: An Inuit Example from the East Coast of Hudson Bay, Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1980, E.A. Smith, Inujjamiut Foraging Strategies: Evolutionary Ecology of an Arctic Hunting Economy, Aldine de Gruyter, Hawthorne, NY, 1991] in Inukjuak, northern Canada. Although the results support the evenness hypothesis, they also show that the nature of archaeological data may make evenness measures difficult to use accurately. Evenness can be used to understand changing prehistoric encounter rates with prey, but many conditions must be met for it to do so.