Resilience of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) to human hunting in precolonial New England: The faunal remains from the Morgan Site (6HT120), Rocky Hill, Connecticut

Abstract

Resilience – the ability of a system to withstand and recover from perturbation – has become an important concept for archaeologists and investigating resilient natural resource use and management has important implications for understanding sustainability. In precolonial eastern North America, it has been argued that white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) were resilient to overhunting by humans, but this hypothesis has been only minimally tested. Here, I analyze a zooarchaeological assemblage from the Morgan Site in central Connecticut, dating to the 11th-14th centuries AD, to evaluate whether deer populations at this time experienced any perceptible hunting pressure. These data suggest that deer at the Morgan Site were not being overhunted. Fragmentation of deer skeletal elements for grease and marrow is consistent with intensive exploitation, but the strong dietary dependence on a highly preferred species like deer, evidence for hunting deer in proximity to the site, and minimal juvenile mortality all indicate that deer were not overexploited. Additionally, most of these deer were especially large-bodied. Given the evidence for a lack of hunting pressure, the large body size of deer observed here may have resulted from anthropogenic ecosystem engineering facilitating deer population growth and contributing to the apparent resilience of the species to predation.