Investigating Women's Provisioning Efforts in the Ethnoarchaeological Record of Central African Forest Foragers

Prior studies on contemporary hunter-gatherer diets relied on observational techniques, which alone cannot capture the entirety of what people eat. Furthermore, existing scholarship in this realm often focuses on men as providers while overlooking women’s efforts. This is despite indications that women substantially contribute as well as long-standing debates about the role of gendered segregation of labor and how women’s and men’s family provisioning goals may differ. Thus, questions remain about what people eat as well as who is providing the food consumed. This dissertation reports the results of an ethnoarchaeological project that investigated the impact of hunter-gatherer women’s provisioning efforts and the diets of women, men, and children to provide much-needed insight about what people actually consume with an approach that centered women and used an independent measure of diet. This study was conducted among the Central African Bofi and Aka. Among these populations a hunting and gathering lifestyle remains important, with women and men often cooperating and engaging in gender-specific food procurement labor tasks daily. Data were collected over multiple field visits spanning the wet and dry season to address several key questions: Do members of the group eat more meat (acquired mostly by men) or foraged food items (acquired mostly by women)? Who is provisioning the children? What do the diets of nuclear families suggest about women’s versus men’s foraging goals? This dissertation used a multi-method approach to assess various predictions and expectations about the role of women’s provisioning efforts on the diets of the group at the population, extended family, and nuclear family level using a conceptual framework derived from Human Behavioral Ecology with the underlying foundation that women’s foraging goals align with family provisioning. By integrating ethnographically derived data with biomolecular analyses of hair to examine independent measures of diet (i.e., stable isotope analysis) and stress (i.e., cortisol analysis), this work provides greater insight into what people were actually eating, and thus potentially who provided the food consumed. The results of this study led to several conclusions about the Bofi and Aka forager’s diets: 1) women provided most of the food consumed by women and children resulting in a similar diet, while men likely provided most of their own food and consumed a more distinct diet higher in protein, 2) seasonality played a large role in the composition of the diet, women’s and men’s contributions, and possibly the provisioning of children, and 3) a gendered difference in diet exists among both adults and children. Ultimately, this work suggests that women’s provisioning efforts have an impact on the group’s diets at various levels, with strong support for a claim that women’s foraging goals align more so than men’s with family provisioning.