Understanding Long Term Relationships Between Environmental Change, Human Resilience And Territoriality

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This project will investigate the evolution of human territoriality across deep time and will allow Drs. Robert Hard, Raymond Mauldin, Jacob Freeman, and Deborah Bolnick to address fundamental questions about the emergence of territorial systems. How and why territorial systems emerge is poorly understood although its importance as a fundamental social process is clear. Territoriality has been linked to the development of property rights and social scientists have argued that territoriality enhances the sustainable use of natural resources such as fisheries and forests. Anthropologists know that human societies develop widely varying approaches to maintaining and holding territories. Some hunter-gatherer societies have little concern for maintaining territorial boundaries while others closely patrol and defend small patches, yet the conditions underlying this variability are not well understood. While most information about human territoriality comes from ethnographic cases, the archaeological record is the only source of data concerning the changing nature of human territoriality across hundreds of generations. Such information contextualizes and has the potential to shed new insight on territorial changes occurring in the world today.Over thirty years ago, anthropologists used ethnographic data to propose the Model of Economic Defensibility. The model states that as resources become more dense and predictable, given a sufficient level of competition, individuals will maximize their fitness by claiming ownership over a territory. In the Model of Economic Defensibility, the productivity and predictability of resources determines the area (i.e., the home-range) an individual needs to find food. In turn, the size of an individual's home-range changes the costs versus benefits of investment in territoriality. To adopt territoriality, individuals must expend time and energy to monitor boundaries and attack intruders. As an individual's home-range size increases, the costs associated with restricting access rise more quickly than the benefits attained. That is, holding competition equal, the larger an individual's home-range, the lower the net benefit of territoriality. Despite its fundamental importance, this model has yet to be rigorously evaluated with archaeological data. The Morhiss site, located in the Texas Coastal Plain, is an ideal setting to evaluate this model. Located 20 miles from the coast, Morhiss represents at least 6000 years of use, and contains a record of shifting territoriality. Excavated 75 years ago, these collections hold data necessary to evaluate this model. Drs. Robert Hard (University of Texas at San Antonio), Jacob Freeman (Utah State University), Raymond Mauldin (University of Texas at San Antonio), and Deborah Bolnick (University of Texas at Austin) will use an array of laboratory analyses including, radiocarbon dating, carbon, nitrogen, and strontium isotopes, and ancient DNA to conduct this research. This work will be fundamental to the formation of regional databases, will contribute to a general procedure to assess the assumptions of the Model of Economic Defensibility, and will contribute to understanding the evolution of property rights. Finally, our approach will establish a protocol to use minimally destructive techniques to build datasets from curated collections. The team's work will contribute to the education of graduate and postdoctoral students as well as an outreach program for high school teachers.