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In the late eighteenth century, U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins observed that Creeks maintained “beloved bear-grounds” near towns to protect bear habitat. However, Hawkins also noted, “as the cattle increase and the bear decrease, they are hunted in common.” Hawkins’ observations suggest a relationship between the frequency of the two species, and zooarchaeological assemblages from Creek towns support this hypothesis. A frequency index of bear and cattle remains indicate that as cattle increased over time, bear decreased precipitously. Creek hunters initially despised cattle, believing that beef would make the consumer slow and dim-witted. However, with the decline of the deerskin trade, Creek hunters turned to animal husbandry. The best graze for cattle was found in the “beloved bear grounds” and cattle husbandry quickly devastated native bear habitats. By the end of the eighteenth century, cattle displaced bears from their native habitat, and replaced bears in Creek life.

Chapter 4 summarizes the construction, subsistence, and social correlates of Huaca Prieta, a mound site in the lower Chicama Valley on the north coast of Peru, from the earliest evidence of human presence in the Late Pleistocene (ca. 12,500 14C BP) through abandonment at 3,800 14C BP. Marine resources were important throughout the sequence, which saw an early advent of agriculture and increasing population, complexity, and monumentality.

Chapter 7 reviews results of zooarchaeological research at Caylán, a large Early Horizon center located 15 km inland in the Nepeña valley on the Peruvian north coast. This dense, urban site was occupied in the Nepeña Phase (800–450 cal BC) the Samanco Phase (450–150 cal BC). Much of the plant and animal food was supplied by external producers or foragers. Marine resources were always important at the site but over time the inhabitants increasingly relied on domestic animals. The authors see little evidence for top-down control of the subsistence economy; animal products moved through multiple networks structured by kinship and other exchange mechanisms.

This chapter is an institutional history of Tupelo Homesteads. The Homesteaders were subject to a milder and more subtle form of pressure to cooperate than were the clients of Dyess and Hillhouse. This chapter explores the chaffing nature of detailed requirements, mutual economic dependence, and anxiety about a 30-year mortgage. The selection process ensured that the Homesteaders would be people of proven economic and social middle-class standing. At Tupelo the initial selection process was, at the insistence of M.L. Wilson, left to a local committee. As a consequence of that local knowledge the selected Homesteaders were industrious, community and family oriented, and fully intended to pursue economic and social mobility.

This chapter addresses the reformist agenda of the New Deal planners and how the Arthurdale School was conceived as an integral experiment within the subsistence or, earlier, the back-to-the-land movement. The chapter looks at the historical conception of the back-to-the-land movement and its origins and how it developed as a potential idea to build communities for those displaced by the Depression. During the Depression era, this concept came to be known as the subsistence homestead idea and was eventually realized through the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Leaders in the conception of the federal homesteads included Ellwood Mead and Milburn L. Wilson. The ideal homestead embodied the American conception of pioneer spirit and the virtues believed to be found in rural or country life. The first federal subsistence homestead would be located in north central West Virginia to assist coal miners who had lost their jobs and desperately needed relief. The American Friends Service Committee led the local relief efforts in the area and assisted in the formation of the first homestead at Arthurdale. It addresses the progressive conception of using the school to restore a community life focusing on identity and a sense of place in an economically depressed region in Appalachia.

Elsie Ripley Clapp was selected as the principal and director of community affairs for the Arthurdale project and its school. This chapter explores the background and intellectual development guiding her leadership goals and philosophy at Arthurdale. Clapp held a master’s degree in philosophy from Columbia University and had served as an assistant to the American philosopher John Dewey. She accepted Dewey’s pragmatism and philosophy of education and was considered one of the few experts in rural education in progressive education circles, although even her experience was limited. Her first experience in rural work was at the Ballard Memorial School near Louisville, Kentucky; she served there from 1929 to1934. Clapp was familiar with social welfare work and accepted the concept that the school could restore the loss of community clearly attributed, by federal planners and reformers, to the experience in the coal camps. Clapp’s understanding of progressive education and her philosophy of the community school are addressed as well as her attempt to apply Dewey’s philosophy of education in the new homestead community. She would be assisted by well-known educators such as Lucy Sprague Mitchell of Bank Street College, New York, who served on the National Advisory Committee for Arthurdale along with Dewey and others.

Under an agricultural economy, the ancient Maya depended on plants for food. While most discussions of Maya subsistence focus on maize production, this study has undertaken an extensive review of the ethnographic and botanical literature and found nearly 500 Indigenous food plants, domesticated, cultivated, and wild, reported as used by the Maya. The implications of this edible cornucopia of plants is discussed in terms of historic and current models of ancient Maya subsistence, implications for sustainability under environmental and demographic pressures, the range of plants likely to have been incorporated into marketing or exchange systems, and implications for identification of these plants in the archaeological record.

Data from the Jomon period (ca. 16,000–2,500 cal. B.P.) of the Japanese archipelago offer a unique opportunity to examine both short- and long-term changes in human-environment interaction. Scientists have suggested that climate changes, which affected vegetation and the availability of both terrestrial and marine resources, must have been closely linked with the changes in the Jomon culture. Scholars have also investigated the importance of human impacts on the Jomon landscape at the local or regional levels. Chronological resolution of these analyses has become a key issue in examining both climatic and archaeological data. Using data from Sannai Maruyama and its neighboring sites in Aomori, northern Japan, this paper examines three factors that seem to have been closely related to the growth and decline of large Middle Jomon sites in this region: 1) climate change, 2) human impacts on the landscape, and 3) subsistence specialization. In particular, we hypothesize that subsistence specialization was a key factor in allowing settlement growth but at the same time it increased vulnerability to environmental changes. Through these discussions, it is suggested that the examination of the interrelation of these factors is indispensable to our understanding of the mechanisms of long-term culture change.

In chapter 2, “‘Som Times I Git a Nuff and Som Times I Don’t’: Confederate Subsistence and the Evidence from the Florence Stockade (38FL2), Florence, South Carolina,” Judith A. Sichler explains how the Confederate Army's Subsistence Bureau had general provisions regarding what was to be included as rations for its soldiers—yet as the realities of supply and demand, the inadequacies of logistics, and the stress of a wartime economy took its toll, these items often had to be purchased locally, bartered for, or requisitioned, to feed the soldiers. Zooarchaeological data from the Florence Stockade provides a snapshot of what foods were available and the likely mode of supply for the items.

This chapter explores the history of subsistence categories like “farmer”, “hunter-gatherer”, and “pastoralist” in Western intellectual thought. It argues that such subsistence categories have been mobilized as identity categories and, therefore, have much in common with (and often served to buttress) other identity categories like gender, race, and ethnicity. But Africans, too, invented categories of subsistence and imbued them with social and political meaning. As Western conceptual categories like “farmer” and “hunter-gatherer” were applied to the study of African societies and their pasts, they masked the kinds of vernacular categories of subsistence that form the subject of this book. This chapter lays out the stakes for treating these two coeval intellectual histories of subsistence categories as contingent and distinct. The chapter closes with a short survey of approaches to power, the politics of status, and affect in precolonial African historiography and a summary of the chapter contents.

The aim of this applied research, conducted for Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game, is to examine how residents, both Native and non-Native, of an “urban” Alaskan community harvest and use wild foods. At the time, most research on “subsistence” (or household provisioning) was conducted in small villages with majority Native populations. The goal is to provide baseline data that will be used by the ADF&G and other government bodies to manage Alaska’s wild resources. The chapter discusses designing and administering a random household survey and the synergy that can exist between quantitative and qualitative research methods.

This chapter is a narrative-based construction of a seasonal year using various archaeological datasets, with a focus on subsistence. The authors approach the fictional interpretation of the past from the framework of human behavioral ecology, which they find particularly useful in everyday research because it focuses on the decisions of individuals – specifically those decisions that result in the everyday actions from which the archaeological record is constructed. By imagining the daily, seasonal activities through the eyes of a young girl, they give those individuals identities and begin to think about the social relationships among earlier Archaic peoples and the landscapes that are rooted in economic relationships.

With the earliest recorded Umm an-Nar (2700–2000 BC) tombs, Umm an-Nar Island (UAE) offers insight into early strategies of human social organization in southeastern Arabia. The author used strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotope ratios from the enamel of those interred within three tombs to test the hypothesis that, over time, these populations became increasingly sedentary and more reliant on coastal resources. Variable strontium isotope ratios allude to either a more mobile lifestyle or a more diverse diet. Corresponding oxygen and carbon isotope values suggest that residents did not become more mobile in the latter period; instead, dietary variability became more pronounced. This shift in subsistence economy may be explained by differential resource access, which is possibly a result of either dissimilar regional geographic origins or growing social hierarchies and disparate access to power.

Besides “identity loan,” another important illicit subsistence strategy crucial to farmworkers’ survival is relying upon child labor. While many sources have documented the perils of children working in agriculture, few have examined the fact that children must assume others’ identities in order to be hired. Because child labor laws make it illegal for teens to work more than 60 hours a week, no employer will hire a teen “on the books.” Teens, then, routinely disguise themselves as adults in order to work the summer harvest to supplement their parents’ limited incomes. Yet teens’ working loaned identities propels them into a “space of nonexistence” when they are injured, preventing them from receiving the care they need. Indeed, teens’ work in the fields in fact incriminates both their employers and their parents, leading to their or their parents’ denounce-ability, untreated illness, and sometimes death.

The focus of the chapter is plant ecological and agro-ecological research in colonial Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), from the Great Depression to the beginning of the so called “Second Colonial Occupation”. Colonial ecological research contributed to and was structured by the narrative of an impending social and ecological breakdown of “native” subsistence communities triggered by the impact of colonialism: the unintended consequences of Pax Britannica, the introduction of a capitalist economy, the creation of reserves. Ecology held the promise of not only helping to come to grips with these complexities, but of serving as a science of planning, opening up the possibility of successfully steering a course between the Scylla of social and ecological breakdown and the Charybdis of stagnation and low productivity. Northern Rhodesia – then still a backwater to the Empire – consequently became one of the hot spots for the testing out of ecological research methods.

This chapter asks whether people would be more or less likely to seek employment if they received a Citizen's Income. Given that it is often the administrative complexity that benefits claimants experience when they take employment or increase their earnings, a simpler system would make it more likely that people would seek and take employment. People are shown to be innately motivated to seek employment, but evidence suggests that they wish to be properly rewarded for their work. ‘Tax credits’ are experienced as wage top-ups for some and not for others, suggesting that some employees are not properly rewarded. A Citizen's Income would be for everybody and so would not have this effect. Labour supply curves inform a discussion of motivation. Means-tested benefits reduce motivation, so coercion by active labour market policies is required. A Citizen's Income would not reduce motivation because they would not contribute to marginal deduction rates and would not disrupt household budgets during labour market transitions

The chapter introduces subsistence requirements in food consumption into a simple New Keynesian model with flexible food and sticky non-food prices. It shows how the endogenous structural transformation that results from subsistence affects the dynamics of the economy, the design of monetary policy, and the properties of inflation at different levels of development. A calibrated version of the model encompasses both rich and poor countries and broadly replicates the properties of inflation across the development spectrum, including the dominant role played by changes in the relative price of food in poor countries. The authors derive a welfare-based loss function for the monetary authority and show that optimal policy calls for complete (in some cases near-complete) stabilization of sticky-price non-food inflation, despite the presence of a food-subsistence threshold. Subsistence amplifies the welfare losses of policy mistakes, however, raising the stakes for monetary policy at earlier stages of development.