| The origins and development of food producing economies is an important milestone in human development. In the Eastern Woodlands of North America, food production commenced with the domestication of cucurbit gourds, and a suite of disturbed-habitat adapted plants, including goosefoot, sunflower, marshelder, erect knotweed, and maygrass. The earliest evidence for most of these cultigens comes from upland rockshelter sites. Much attention has been focused on these plants, but not on concomitant change in faunal resource selection and use.;I conducted excavations at Pine Crest Rockshelter (I5LE70) in Lee County, Kentucky in the summer and fall of 1996. Faunal data from Pine Crest Terminal Archaic and Woodland components are presented and compared with several archaeological sites with well-published fauna. I attempted to draw inferences from them to test a series of hypotheses. I thought that as plant cultivation increased in importance, small vertebrate use would increase as well. I thought that deer bone would decline due to scarcity, or be more highly fragmented as people attempted to get more within bone nutrients, such as marrow. I thought that deer bones, when present, would tend to be higher utility elements due to differential transport. What I found was that the data are highly variable. In areas where aquatic resources are available, they increase from the Archaic to the Woodland, but small mammals do not necessarily increase. Deer use remains constant in upland assemblages, or at least in the Cumberland Plateau region. Deer use seems to decrease in lowland locales, such as the Lower Illinois Valley. Data on fragmentation rates are not adequately reported; deer utility is highly variable from site to site.;There are a few broad trends in the comparative data, but there are no monolithic shifts in faunal patterning. Adoption of cultivation, at least in the uplands of eastern Kentucky, apparently made no significant, immediate impact on hunting behavior. Cultigens were added to the existing suite of food resources, perhaps as a form of risk reduction, but established hunting/foraging techniques persisted. |
