Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology

Behavioral ecology is the study of adaptive behavior in relation to social and environmental circumstances. Analysts working from this perspective hold that the reproductive strategies and decision-making capacities of all living organisms—including humans—are shaped by natural selection. Archaeologists have been using this proposition in the study of past human behavior for more than 30 years. Significant insights on variation in prehistoric human subsistence, life history, social organization, and their respective fossil and archaeological consequences have been among the more important results.     

Tool hoards and Neolithic use of the landscape in north-eastern Ireland

Summary. Archaeologists frequently suggest that the Neolithic occupants of Ireland and Britain may not have been fully settled farmers, but were, instead, at least partially nomadic pastoralists. However, human use of any landscape is more complex than the current debate suggests, and this debate has included few systematic studies designed to evaluate this issue in detail. This paper examines hoards (or ‘caches’) of flaked stone tools in County Antrim, Ireland, to consider the links between anticipatory tool storage and human land‐use patterns. Our data imply regular human movements over the study area, possibly linked to transhumant use of different altitudinal zones, with functionally and, sometimes, technologically specific classes of tools stored in different areas. However, the larger context of data on the Irish Neolithic clearly indicates that these movements were part of a way of life centred on permanent horticultural homesteads.