Jonathan Dombrosky, a Ph.D candidate and Associate Professor Emily Lena Jones, both from the Department of Anthropology at The University of New Mexico, recently received a National Science Foundation grant for $30,298 to research the impact of a changing environment on the incorporation of new foods into human diets.
My dissertation research centers on one broad question: How and why do people who heavily rely on agriculture make decisions about new foods to eat? I specifically focus on fishing here around Albuquerque about 700 to 400 years ago among Ancestral Pueblo farmers. I am particularly interested in how people might have responded to environmental change wetter conditions in this instance to include more fish in their diets, said Dombrosky.
This project helps develop archaeologically visible indicators of when a food type recovered in relatively low abundance might relate to human nutritional demands. In the American Southwest, it has long been assumed that fishes were unimportant in the diet of Ancestral Pueblo groups, he noted. Yet, small numbers of fish remains are consistently recovered from late prehispanic archaeological sites in New Mexico, and they are rare during earlier time periods.
This is a tricky question. Fishing certainly wasn’t the main way that people were getting enough food to eat back then. They were, after all, farmers, but I think Ancestral Pueblo people fished more than most archaeologists think they did to supplement their diets. So, the idea that fishes don’t matter at all among Pueblo groups (which has been a major assumption for a long time) is categorically false, Dombrosky observed.
The end of drought conditions may have impacted how people made different decisions about the foods they ate, Dombrosky said. In addition, prehispanic fishing in desert ecosystems is of interest to both archaeologists and ecologists.
According to Dombrosky and Jones, understanding more about the ecology of prehispanic fish communities will provide a new source of paleoenvironmental information in a region where fish remains are thought to be insignificant. Desert streams are of critical conservation concern given modern anthropogenic impacts and current drought forecasts. The results of this project will be of interest not only to scholars, but to agencies charged with the management of plants and animals in desert ecosystems.
The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131, (505) 277-0111 New Mexico’s Flagship University