The effects of resource depression on foraging efficiency, diet breadth, and patch use in southern New Zealand

Abstract

While many studies have examined human impacts on prehistoric environments, few have explicitly examined how foragers adapt to the changing environmental situations that they have created. The goal of this analysis is to study the relationship between human foraging economies and human-related environmental change in southern New Zealand. Foraging theory is used to generate predictions about subsistence change resulting from the declining abundance of important resources such as moas and seals. In particular, these predictions examine changes in (1) the kind of resources exploited (foraging efficiency), (2) the number of resources utilized (diet breadth), and (3) the habitats exploited (patch choice). The predictions are tested using the large assemblage of vertebrate faunal remains from the well-stratified and well-dated Shag River Mouth site. This study shows that using foraging theory models to structure analysis provides a more fine-grained spatial and temporal resolution of subsistence change in southern New Zealand than has been previously achieved.