TY - JOUR
T1 - The ethnoarchaeology of juvenile foragers
T2 - Shellfishing strategies among Meriam children
AU - Bird, Douglas W.
AU - Bliege Bird, Rebecca
N1 - Funding Information:
The research presented here was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SBR 961 6887), a Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation to the primary author, a grant from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, The Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Leakey Foundation. So many people have contributed to the Meriam ethnoarchaeological project over the past several years, most of all the Meriam le, the Mer Island Community Council, Eric A. Smith, Craig Hadley, Erica Luckel, Peter Veth, Melissa Carter, John Beaton, and especially Chairman Ron Day, Rotannah Passi, Andrew Passi, Dalcy Gibas, Del Passi, Ron and Aia Passi, and Sonny Passi. We are very grateful. We thank Jim O’Connell, Kristen Hawkes, Eric A. Smith, and Nicholas Blurton Jones for their intellectual contribution to this analysis. Jason Bright and an anonymous reviewer made very useful comments that significantly improved this article.
PY - 2000/12
Y1 - 2000/12
N2 - Recognizing children's contribution to the archaeological record may be crucial for our ideas about the role of children in human evolution. Despite this, analyses of children's activities and how they might shape archaeological patterns are almost entirely absent from discussions about site formation processes. This may in turn result from the assumption that children are either inconsequential in their foraging activities or that identifying children's activities archaeologically will be difficult if not impossible. This challenge drew our attention toward children's intertidal gathering among the Meriam of the Eastern Torres Strait as a possible agent of patterned and predictable variability in shell middens. We present an analysis of differences between the prey choice and field processing strategies of children and adults and explore an hypothesis for predicting their archaeological effects on faunal assemblage variability.
AB - Recognizing children's contribution to the archaeological record may be crucial for our ideas about the role of children in human evolution. Despite this, analyses of children's activities and how they might shape archaeological patterns are almost entirely absent from discussions about site formation processes. This may in turn result from the assumption that children are either inconsequential in their foraging activities or that identifying children's activities archaeologically will be difficult if not impossible. This challenge drew our attention toward children's intertidal gathering among the Meriam of the Eastern Torres Strait as a possible agent of patterned and predictable variability in shell middens. We present an analysis of differences between the prey choice and field processing strategies of children and adults and explore an hypothesis for predicting their archaeological effects on faunal assemblage variability.
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U2 - 10.1006/jaar.2000.0367
DO - 10.1006/jaar.2000.0367
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0034357423
SN - 0278-4165
VL - 19
SP - 461
EP - 476
JO - Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
JF - Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
IS - 4
ER -