Exploratory Models of Social Organization and Adaptive Responses to Risk in Subarctic Alaska

Аннотация

Cultural stability and change in subarctic Alaska are often couched in terms of archaeological constructs derived from lithic typologies, migration, and (to a lesser extent) diffusion. Major problems explaining material-culture continuity and transitions remain largely unresolved. To address these problems, models of resource management strategies (RMS) are developed for the two major cultural systems: a Late Pleistocene / Early Holocene (LP/EH) RMS (12,500 – 6000 cal BP) and Middle Holocene (MH) RMS (6000 – 1000 cal BP). This allows a first approximation of social organization and an investigation of the systemic relationships among demography, habitat use, mobility, storage, economy, and technology as constraints on exchange, group size, territory, and social interaction. These elements of both RMS are inferred or estimated through archaeological proxies, and ethnographic data, or both. Results indicate that the MH RMS resembles recent subarctic Dene hunter-gatherers, while the LP/EH RMS is substantially different in social organization, more similar to early Paleo-Indian complexes. The two RMS yield different predictions with respect to responses to risk, and these are assessed by examining several periods of hypothetically increased risk. The LP/EH RMS managed substantial climate change during and after the Younger Dryas without major technological or land-use changes, due in part to flexible social organization, mobility, and economic strategies. Mid-Holocene vegetation changes connected to decreasing bison and wapiti populations led to a collapse of this system.