Dietary evenness, prey choice, and human-environment interactions

• Main Author: Emily Lena Jones
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2004
• Subjects: Diversity; Evenness; Zooarchaeology; Optimal foraging theory; Prey choice; Arctic Measures of evenness; which quantify the degree to; Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.495.5626; http://www.ffzg.unizg.hr/arheo/ska/tekstovi/dietary_evenness.pdf

Although measures of evenness of archaeological faunas are increasingly used in zooarchaeological analyses, the widely accepted hypothesis that increasing evenness should indicate increasing dietary breadth has not been tested. In this paper, I examine three factors that can contribute to changing evenness values—changing encounter rates with high-ranked prey types, changing diet breadth, and similarity between the return rates of the highest-ranked resources—and discuss ways of controlling the latter two factors. I then test the “evenness hypothesis ” using ethnographic data collected by Smith [E.A. Smith, Evolutionary Ecology and the