Meskwaki fur trade economics: The zooarchaeology of cultural contact

The goal of this study was to compare how two farmer/forager societies utilized the same ecological location, one practicing a subsistence economy and the other incorporating fur trading into its subsistence economy. The study applied a theoretical approach rooted in Behavioral Ecology to explore the impact that participation in a world economy had on subsistence in an archaeologically and historically documented developing economy. The study focused on the analysis of faunal remains from the Bell Site (47WN09) located in eastern central Wisconsin, near the city of Oshkosh. The site has two distinct temporal components. The first is a 13th century village or encampment occupied by a Mississippian group using a ceramic style reminiscent of those found at Aztalan and Cahokia. The second is the remains of the Grand Village of the Meskwaki occupied between circa 1680 and 1730. Two predictive models based on optimal foraging theory were generated for the study. The first model predicted that the Meskwaki involvement in fur procurement activities caused them to divert subsistence resource procurement time to non-subsistence resources, leading to declining optimality of diet. The second model predicted that the Meskwaki offset some of the costs of pelt procurement by building up food surpluses in anticipation of times when trapping would take precedence over subsistence hunting, thus minimizing risks of dietary shortfall through storage. Results indicate that the Meskwaki had a flexible adaptive subsistence system and were able to retain dietary optimality by shifting species emphasis and seasonal timing, and that fish storage may have played a role in buffering dietary risks associated with the fur trade. The observed patterns also suggest Meskwaki enhancements to division of labor and task scheduling which deserve further exploration in subsequent studies.