Optimal Foraging Patterns in the Sierra Nevada, Alta California

Abstract

Western Mono acorn caches in the south-central Sierra Nevada are distributed in five km radii around central place winter settlements corresponding to predicted distributions, taking into account labor and travel costs associated with caching. Caches more than five km from winter settlements are distributed in a manner facilitating spring residential moves. These data indicate an efficient foraging and caching pattern geared towards maximizing storage capacity around winter settlements while at the same time fostering substantial seasonal group mobility. Because acorn caching was traditionally women's labor in Mono society, this situation clearly demonstrates that women's economic pursuits not only sustained Mono populations through the winter, but also facilitated seasonal residential moves essential to exploiting a patchy Sierran resource base. Because women's labor underwrote so much of the Mono economy, it also evinces a case where efficient women's foraging paid for ostensibly inefficient, status-seeking men's behaviors, such as trade and perhaps prestige hunting. This division of labor, and the differential prestige associated with men's versus women's pursuits, illustrates how attributes of sociocultural complexity can develop in relatively small foraging societies, ultimately suggesting that similar patterns may hold for the evolution of complex social systems throughout late prehistoric and contact period California.