Testing models of ancient forager social and territorial organization with a strontium isoscape

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For most of human history, people have developed different technological and social strategies to reduce the risk of food insecurity in different environments. These strategies are expected to differ systematically depending on the abundance and predictability of food resources in time and space. This project will use chemical and archaeological evidence to investigate how human hunter-gatherers used flexible social and territorial organization strategies to minimize risk in different environmental conditions. The research will shed light on how humans have coped with variable environmental conditions in the past, and how they may do so in the future. This project will create opportunities for American undergraduate students, especially those from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields, and postdoctoral researchers, to learn chemistry laboratory methods. It will also build research infrastructure through the training of collaborators from the developing world in environmental sampling protocols. Results will be disseminated by peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and science outreach. Primary data will be permanently publicly available through the Digital Archaeological Record website.Chemical "fingerprinting" of foods in different landscapes and human teeth formed at different developmental ages permits reconstruction of human residential histories and mobility patterns. This project will use multiple analytical chemistry techniques, including multi-elemental and strontium isotope ratio-based provenience analysis, to investigate diet and residential histories of pre-agricultural Later Stone Age (LSA) humans between approximately 12 and 6 thousand years ago. The primary objective is to determine how LSA peoples adapted to different resource distributions through contrasting social and territorial organization strategies: territorial defense to preserve exclusive access to abundant and predictable resources, versus extended social networks for sharing information to reduce risk of resource failure in unpredictable environments. Chemical methods for determining the geographic source of human and animal remains will be refined through the analysis of samples of modern soil, airborne dust, plants, mollusk shells, and mammal teeth, and archaeological human teeth. East-Central Africa is an ideal place to examine the relationships among environmental conditions, resource distributions, and socio-territorial organization strategies. Environmental records from East-Central Africa suggest more stability and thus less dramatic contrasts in resource structure during the last 15 thousand years compared to eastern and southern Africa. At present, this region has a long stressful dry season. This dry season may have been longer and more severe during past arid phases and shorter and less severe during wetter phases. Therefore, this an important time and place to investigate contrasting social and territorial strategies for resource exploitation and risk reduction. The results of this research may provide guidance for developing policies and predictive models of human strategic social and territorial organizational responses to changing environments. The methodological refinements developed in this project will be readily transferrable to the earth, environmental, and social sciences, as well as forensic investigations, food origins authentication and biological conservation.