Foraging Theory and the Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: Assessing Late Pleistocene Projectile Point Reduction Strategies

Abstract How humans perceive risk has long been of interest to the social sciences. The colonization of unfamiliar landscapes by Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers is a valuable case study that required novel strategies of risk management, technological organization, and ecological knowledge acquisition. Here, we apply evolutionary theory to projectile point reduction in the Tennessee River Valley to model utility thresholds and assess resharpening versus replacement decisions. We evaluate attributes of Clovis and Cumberland points to quantify artifact use-lives and curation intensity using a dataset drawn from the Paleoindian Database of the Americas. Results indicate that Clovis groups practiced a more conservative lithic resource management strategy by resharpening points further to extract greater utility. By contrast, subsequent Cumberland groups more frequently discarded points with variable amounts of utility remaining, suggesting reduced emphasis on resource conservation. We interpret this difference as reflecting the resolution of landscape knowledge barriers. Clovis groups confronted higher search costs in raw material acquisition, whereas Cumberland groups inherited generational knowledge of local lithic resources and became more familiar with known resource distributions. More broadly, our study demonstrates that lithic artifacts, when modeled as patches of utility, provide archaeologists with rare opportunities to test predictions of optimal foraging theory and risk management.