Hunter-Gatherer Villages, Native American Shellfish Management, and the Importance of Scale in Long-Term Human-Ecosystem Dynamics

Abstract For millennia, Indigenous fisher-hunter-gatherer populations across the globe have navigated the complexities and sensitivities of estuarine ecosystems, leaving robust archaeological and ecological records of long-term, adaptive histories anchored by complex political, economic, and social forms. Regarding the broad, interdisciplinary literature of hunter-gatherer studies, archaeologists in particular have begun to address the undertheorized category of overtly sedentary hunter-gatherer communities and the ways that these societies were able to grow and persist sustainably. This research builds on recent studies investigating the long-term impacts of humans in estuarine environments, contributing a critical, small-scale perspective that expands and complements more recent regional approaches. In doing so, this study presents the largest analysis via the archaeological record of oyster resource management practices at a single Native American village yet to be conducted to evaluate community-scale sustainability among sedentary fisher-hunter-gatherers. More specifically, it investigates the growth of one of the largest Ancestral Muskogean towns to have existed along the Atlantic coast—on Ossabaw Island, Georgia—and the ways that people managed shellfisheries in the face of growing demographic pressures on both local ecologies and social, political, and economic institutions. Leveraging absolute chronologies and a shellfish morphometric dataset from two dozen domestic middens, sustainable resource management practices are evaluated across a single community’s history.