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| 2. Food Remains |
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| How did prehistoric peoples make their living? The answer comes not only from artifacts like stone axes and digging sticks, but from food remains of all kinds. Animal bones provide valuable information on hunting practices, on herding and management of domesticated animals, and on butchery techniques. For example, a band of Paleo-Indian hunters drove a large bison herd into a gully at Olsen-Chubbock, Colorado, in 6000 B.C.E. By analyzing the thousands of bison bones in the gully, archaeologists have managed to reconstruct the standardized butchery techniques the Indians used after the hunt. | 1 |
| Plant remains survive at many sites and can be recovered by using flotation techniques, that is, floating soil samples through water and fine screens and collecting the light seeds from the surface while the residue falls away. Ancient seeds show us that foraging for wild plant foods was of vital importance to human societies from the earliest times. They also provide insights into ancient agricultural techniques, into the cereal and root crops that sustained early farming societies and early industrial civilizations for thousands of years. Fish bones, freshwater shells, and seashells, as well as artifacts and ancient rock paintings, tell us much about prehistoric subsistence patterns. | 2 |
| Reconstructing actual prehistoric diets is much harder, for differential preservation of food remains causes many foods to be underrepresented in the archaeological record. Desiccated human feces found in dry caves in western North America have told us much about prehistoric Indian diets as early as 6,000 years ago. Sophisticated carbon isotope analyses use the ratios between two stable carbon isotopes—C-12 and C-13—in animal tissues to establish the diets of prehistoric populations as they switched from wild plant foods to a predominantly cereal diet. | 3 |
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