Pre-Columbian Foraging in Stable, Inland Environments: An Archaeological Example from the Tombigbee River Drainage, Mississippi and Alabama

Abstract

Past human environmental impact is a subject of interest for researchers in many fields, partly because research into the effects of long-term human land use has the potential to influence contemporary and future management practices geared toward achieving sustainability in resource use. We present an example from the Tombigbee River valley, located in Mississippi and Alabama, USA, which shows how multiple data sets derived from archaeological remains can be used to characterize the effects of Native land use practices in an interior continental setting. The data show resource depression, nutritional stress, increased interpersonal conflict, and other markers of a sedentary foraging population at the limit of its environment’s carrying capacity during the Late Woodland period (AD 600–1000). This situation is similar to other reported archaeological cases where human populations were spatially constrained, but may differ in important ways from situations where sedentary settlement patterns evolved in other environments.