Ithaca College

Paula Turkon, of the Department of Anthropology, presented her paper as part of a Society for American Archaeology symposium in March 2008. The paper compared the relationship between food production and socially complex cultures in Africa and North America.

Paula and her coauthors focused on combining environmental reconstruction data with evidence for human impact, social organization, and food consumption, to propose a model of food production in the Malpaso Valley, Zacatecas, Mexico.

In their paper, the authors question whether accumulation of wealth was a viable strategy in this semi-arid environment where unpredictable and often insufficient rainfall for agricultural production may have made an economic foundation of power a struggle.

They propose a model that suggests that, while high-status people ate better than low-status people, they do not appear to have controlled production resources or harvest. Instead, they adapted to local environmental constraints by consuming foods productive during periods of drought and allowed food production to be managed at the household level, permitting the elite to focus on alternate demonstrations of power.