FROM FORAGING TO INCIPIENT FOOD PRODUCTION: SUBSISTENCE CHANGE AND CONTINUITY ON THE CUMBERLAND PLATEAU OF EASTERN KENTUCKY. (VOLUMES I AND II)

This thesis documents the change from foraging to incipient food production in the Red River drainage of the Cumberland Plateau of Eastern Kentucky. Utilizing concepts adapted from evolutionary ecology and ethnology, a predictive model of seasonal subsistence and settlement for a foraging society in the Red River basin is developed. The theoretically derived patterns of resource use and settlement locations are then compared with concrete archaeological data from the Late Archaic and Early Woodland periods from the North Fork of the Red River. These periods span the transition from foraging to the beginnings of garden horticulture.;General correspondence between the theoretically derived subsistence-settlement pattern and archaeological "reality" is indicated. The introduction of the Eastern Agricultural Complex during the Early Woodland period was found to have had little impact on the Red River societies, suggesting that foraging continued to provide the mainstay of the diet. Some evidence for increasing residential stability was noted for Early Woodland utilization of rockshelters, but overall changes were hardly dramatic.