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The Shellfishers of St. Catherines Island:Hardscrabble Foragers or FarmingBeachcombers?David Hurst Thomasa

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The Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology, 9:169–182, 2014Copyright © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1556-4894 print / 1556-1828 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15564894.2013.840874

The Shellfishers of St.Catherines Island:Hardscrabble Foragersor Farming Beachcombers?David Hurst ThomasDepartment of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York,

New York, USA

ABSTRACT

St. Catherines Island (Georgia, USA) was separated from the mainlandat about 3000 BC, creating massive estuarine tidal marshes, whichaboriginal foragers began exploiting almost immediately. Correlativeoptimal foraging modeling and four decades of archaeological field-work demonstrate how this baseline shellfishing economy evolved andpersisted, with some local impacts on estuarine resource patches, butno detectable changes in diet breadth over several millennia. The firstSt. Catherines islanders were likely tribal-level, egalitarian societies liv-ing in economically self-sufficient, virtually sedentary, and politicallyautonomous villages. They made the earliest pottery in North Amer-ica. Shortly after AD 800, early Mississippian populations developedinto chiefdoms characterized by ranked, inherited social hierarchies,ascribing social status and wealth at birth. This significant shift tookplace wholly in the context of their long-standing shellfishing economy.In the face of dramatically increasing populations, St. Catherines is-landers gradually intensified their shellfishing and, at about AD 1400,they began cultivating maize and other domesticates. Shellfishing of-fers generally higher return rates than corn farming, so the adoptionof a maize-based economy was likely driven by political, social, andperhaps adaptive changes in the Mississippian world rather than strictlyprovisioning strategies.

Keywords Archaic, development of agriculture, economy and subsistence, foraging the-ory, islands

Received 18 June 2013; accepted 12 August 2013.Address correspondence to David Hurst Thomas, Department of Anthropology, American Museum ofNatural History, CPW at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024, USA. E-mail: thomasd@amnh.org

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INTRODUCTION

Decades of anthropologists and archaeol-ogists have denigrated the role of marineresources and shellfishing in past humandiets: “[This] manner of procuring the es-sentials of life by collecting shells in itselfindicates a low form of human existence. Inall parts of the world, even today, peoplemay be seen by the shore at low water col-lecting for food the shells uncovered by theretreating tide. . . . These people always be-long to the lower classes of society, and leadin this manner a primitive as well as simplelife” (Uhle1907:31).Osborn(1977:158,172)ridiculed the “cornucopia” view of protein-rich resources in the ocean and argued that“shellfish collecting is a labor-intensive strat-egy in which not only does the food itemcontain less ‘optimal’ amounts of protein,but also producers in the society would haveto spend an inordinate amount of time eachdayorsocollectingfoodfordependents.”Os-born argued instead that shellfish are “emer-gency” or “starvation” foods—small, costlyto harvest and process, nutritionally poor,unreliable, and requiring high technologicalinvestments (such as boats) to access, andsusceptible to storm and potentially lethalred tide events.

Agriculture, by contrast, has long beenimplicated—along with increased seden-tism, population growth, and favorable ge-netic changes in key crops—as a primarycausal factor in the development of heredi-tary social inequityaroundtheworld (as sum-marized in Flannery and Marcus 2012:chap.10). The rise of chiefdoms in the AmericanSoutheast, for instance,has longbeenconsid-eredcausally related to theemergenceofMis-sissippian culture, which began in the Mis-sissippi River Valley about AD 700 and wasgenerally accompanied by a major shift toa maize-based economy (Anderson and Sas-saman 2012; Gremillion 2011).

This article explores these issues in thecontext of shellfishing history on St. Cather-ines Island (Georgia, USA; Figure 1). I posesome simple questions: Were the prehis-toric St. Catherines islanders hardscrabbleforagers barely getting by on the emer-gency, starvation rations of the marshland?

Or were they fortunate beachcombers privi-leged to exploit the essentially inexhaustibleresources of Georgia’s Golden Isles? Andwhy, finally, would these shellfishers decideto become farmers?

ST. CATHERINES ISLAND ECOLOGY

Modern St. Catherines Island was born about3000 BC when sea levels rose sufficiently toisolate the Pleistocene core from the main-land (Bishop et al. 2011; Thomas 2008). Aswith the other composite islands of coastalGeorgia, St. Catherines Island ranks amongthe broadest and most resource-rich barrierislands in the world (Pilkey 2003). These saltmarshes and estuaries front one of world’srichest environments—several times moreproductive than America’s most fertile farm-land (Johnsonet al. 1974).TheGeorgiacoast-line, only 160 km long, protects one-third ofall salt marshes in eastern North America.

The mature maritime forests of the Geor-gia Sea Islands are highly productive ter-restrial counterparts to the rich littoral andmarine resource base. Artesian freshwaterabounds across the Pleistocene island coreand the well-developed podsols and humatezones are admirably suitable to slash-and-burn cultivation of maize. More than 80% ofthe maritime forest edge on St. CatherinesIsland fronts directly on salt marsh, creatingendless optimally positioned central places(see also Thompson and Worth 2011).

The unique accidents of sea-level historytranslated directly into a mosaic of closelyspaced, seasonally diverse, and extraordi-narily productive resource patches. Withinan effective foraging radius of less than10 km, foragers could exploit massive tractsof prime maritime forest, rich salt marsh flats,deep waters of St. Catherines and/or Sapelosounds, seaside shorefront, and the gradu-ally sloping continental shelf of the AtlanticOcean. Then as now, foragers could walkor paddle anyplace on the island and returnhome that night.

MODELING ST. CATHERINES ISLAND

We approach St. Catherines Island archae-ology from the theoretical perspective of

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Figure 1. Location of St. Catherines Island among the other barrier islands of the Georgia Bight.

optimal foraging theory, grounded in themore general paradigm of human behavioralecology (Thomas 2008). The broad rubricof “optimal foraging theory” encompasses awide range of specific models, each of whichemploys a unique set of simplifying assump-tions and constraints, and each can be usedto derive testable hypotheses about foragingbehavior under certain environmental cir-cumstances (e.g., Bettinger 2009; Bird andO’Connell 2006; Winterhalder and Kennett2006; Winterhalder and Smith 1992). Threebasicmodelswereemployed(assummarizedin Thomas 2008:chaps. 6–10).

The diet-breadth (or prey choice) modelpredicts that foragers will optimize the timespent capturing prey, and employs the sim-plifying assumptions that all resources arerandomly distributed (without patches) andthat “capture/handling” and “search” timesrepresent the sum total of all time spent for-aging (Bettinger 2009:1–15; O’Connell andHawkes 1981). An expanded diet-breadthmodel addresses the horticultural technolo-gies introduced to St. Catherines Islandduring the late prehistoric period (Barlow2006). The patch choice model, combinedwith the central limit theorem, predicts that

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foraging effort will correlate directly withefficiency rank order, meaning that for-agers should spend more time working thehigher ranked patches and less time inpatches with lower energetic potential (Bet-tinger 1991; Smith 1991). This same modelevaluates time/energy spent processing re-sources at temporary camps before transportto a residential base (Metcalfe and Barlow1992).

Each model required estimation of rele-vant post-encounter return rates, which wasaccomplished by grouping aboriginal forag-ing on St. Catherines Island into seven hunt-types (following Smith 1991): collectingshellfish, saltwater fishing, terrestrial hunt-ing, sea turtle harvesting (summer), smallturtle harvesting, harvesting mast (fall), andharvesting wild plants (late summer throughearly fall). In addition to estimates from theoptimal foraging and ethnohistoric litera-ture, my archaeological crew and I spent twoyears staging optimal foraging experimentson St. Catherines Island, across a broad rangeof marine and terrestrial resources (Thomas2008:chaps. 7 and 8). Teams of archaeolo-gists harvested tens of thousands of oysters,clams, crabs, whelks (and even periwinkles),butchered hundreds of diamondback terrap-ins, white-tailed deer and American alligator,collected eggs from nesting loggerhead seaturtles, gathered and processed hickory nutsand several kinds of acorns. We ate whatwe harvested and sent samples to nutritionlabs for precise nutritional assays. The result-ing estimates of post-encounter rates for St.Catherines Island resources are summarizedon Table 1.

Salt-marsh fishing is the highest rank-ing hunt-type, followed by terrestrial hunt-ing. Shellfishing is low ranking, with hardclams the highest ranked prey, followed bywhelks, and oysters collected individually.By casting the range of available resourcesinto gender-specific foraging types, overalldiet-breadth considerations narrow into con-crete foraging episodes by individual for-agers making self-interested decisions over avery short time. The archaeological recordreflects the long-term summation of thesedecisions.

ST. CATHERINES ISLANDARCHAEOLOGY

The American Museum of Natural History be-gan intensive archaeological investigationson St. Catherines Island in 1974 and this pro-gram continues today. The 20% probabilistictransect survey of the entire island took threeyears, recording and testing 122 archaeo-logical sites (Thomas 2008; see Figure 2).Direct shoreline reconnaissance augmentedthe systematic surveys (mostly following thelate Holocene surfaces), recording 84 addi-tional shoreline sites. More than 300 radio-carbon determinations document the fine-grained chronology and two dozen dateson “modern” mollusks (known-age speci-mens collected prior to atomic bomb con-tamination) support a “reservoir” correctionfactor specific to the estuaries around St.Catherines Island. The mortuary archaeol-ogy program, under the leadership of ClarkSpencer Larsen, recovered and analyzed re-mains from more than 725 individuals in18 sites.

Zooarchaeological evidence from theearliest occupations on St. Catherines Is-land (the two Late Archaic shell rings; seeTable2)offersonlypartial support for the for-aging model projections (Colaninno 2010).Most terrestrial large-bodied animals (includ-ing black bears, alligators, and sea turtles)are rare in assemblages from the GeorgiaBight, regardless of time period. Instead,NISP and MNI in Late Archaic vertebratecollections are dominated by small-bodied,mass-capture fishes, confirming salt marshfishing as the most productive hunt-type.White-tailed deer provided a considerableportion of the vertebrate biomass, aug-mented by large-bodied fishes, such as reddrums, sharks, and stingrays.

Eastern oyster was the most commontaxon in these shell middens, regardlessof time period. Hard clams, stout tagelus,sea catfishes, mullets, killifishes, drums, di-amondback terrapins, and white-tailed deerdominate the Late Archaic through Missis-sippian assemblages (Bergh 2012a, 2012b;Cannarozzi 2012; Colaninno 2010; Reitz2008; Thomas 2008). Marsh gastropods and

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Table 1. Estimated post-encounter return rates on St. Catherines Island (expressed inkcal/hr; summarized from Thomas 2008:table 8.27).

Marine and estuarine foraging Terrestrial foraging

Black bear (37,352–61,434)

Leatherback turtle ♀ and ♂(26,825–62,792)

Large fish, gill net (21,216–62,792)

Large fish, trot line (16,216–42,252)

Medium fish, gill net

(19,823–25,265)

American alligator (22,000)

Loggerhead turtle, ♀ nesting (21,360)

Very large fish, fish weir (>17,673)

White-tailed deer (12,096–19,895)

Medium fish, trot line

(13,486–17,188)

Large fish, fish weir (7,540–18,760)

Raccoon (9408–13,569)

Medium fish, fish weir

(9623–12,264)

Canada goose (6762–12,522)

Wild turkey (7765–11,200)

Virginia opossum (6540–12,111)

Small fish, gill net (6714–9894)

Large turtle (6547–8273)

Cattail pollen (2750–9360)

Small fish, trot line (4567–6731)

Swamp rabbit (2942–5248)

Medium fish, spear/harpoon

(3206–4086)

Hard clam (2250–4400)

Acorn oil (2954)

Marsh rabbit (2042–3781)

Small turtle (2182–2758)

Hickory nut oil (2100–2200)

Duck (1230–2278)

Knobbed whelk (1380)

Amaranth (1359)

Small fish, spear/harpoon

(1086–1600)

American oyster, collected as singles

(1000–1700)

(Continued on next page)

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Table 1. Estimated post-encounter return rates on St. Catherines Island (expressed inkcal/hr; summarized from Thomas 2008:table 8.27). (Continued)

Marine and estuarine foraging Terrestrial foraging

Diamondback terrapin (1304)

Channeled whelk (1230)

American oyster, mass collected

(750–1200)

Eastern gray squirrel (672–1244)

Bulrush seeds (900)

Ribbed mussel (390–1260) Live oak acorn meal (390–1260)

Sunflower, wild (489)

Maygrass (457)

Chenopod, wild (433)

Laurel oak acorn meal (254)

Blue crab (310)

Knotweed (286)

Little barley (274)

Sumpweed, wild (272)

Cattail roots (128–160)

Bulrush roots (146–160)

Giant ragweed (110)

Marsh periwinkle (26–135)

crustaceans, small birds, and other fishes,small mammals, and turtles were present insmaller numbers. No new taxa were addedto the diet over the millennia, although wedo suspect that sea-level changes during thehuman occupation of St. Catherines Islandcould have markedly shifted encounter ratesof specific shellfish taxa (Rollins and Thomas2011).

The very act of harvesting oysters canfoster “cultivation” since judicious harvest-ing increases post-encounter return rates bytargeting and husbanding a specific patch.Given the recent and historic changes inoyster habitat, management practices, andpoaching in the waters surrounding St.Catherines Island, it isdifficult toestimate theaccelerated return rates possible when theoyster beds are “nurtured” through thought-ful harvesting. But it seems likely that St.Catherines islanders longpracticedapseudo-aquaculture of oysters similar to that sug-

gested by Whitaker (2008) for Californiamussel populations.

Zooarchaeological hard clams from theLate Archaic shell rings on St. CatherinesIsland were collected primarily during thewinter/spring seasons (Quitmyer and Jones2012). Life curves and ontogenetic age datademonstrate that these zooarchaeological as-semblages come from populations in whichlarger, older individuals have been removed.The high mortality early in life is indicativeof intensive harvest of the estuarine patches.

These seven hunt-types help clarifythe degree to which men and womenmay (or may not) share a common dietbreadth (Smith 1991). Whereas oystersand hard clams are low ranking rela-tive to potential prey items in male hunttypes, these same shellfish taxa rank ex-tremely high when viewed against allfemale alternatives, with only two sea-sonally restricted resources—cattail pollen

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Table 2. Cultural chronology of St. Catherines Island (Georgia, USA; modified from Thomas2008:table 15.3).

Period Cultural phaseChronological age

(calibrated) Significant events

AD 1700

Spanish Mission Altamaha Mission Santa Catalina de Guale

(1580–1680)

AD 1580

Late Mississippian Irene Maize cultivation adopted circa

AD 1400

AD 1300 Intensification of shellfishing.

Early Mississippian St. Catherines Inception of heritable social

inequality, with ranked

ascribing positions of social

status and wealth at birth

AD 800

Late Woodland Wilmington

AD 350

Early Woodland Deptford

400 BC

Refuge Initial construction of on-island

burial mounds

1000 BC

Late Archaic St. Simons Shell ring construction, earliest

ceramics in North America,

likely organized into

egalitarian, tribal-level

societies, living in

economically self-sufficient,

virtually sedentary, and

politically autonomous

villages

3000 BC

1Uncalibrated, based on historical documentation.

and oil made from mast—ranking higher(Table 1).

Shellfishing seems attractive for severalreasons. In the nutrient-rich tidal estuaries,mollusks are concentrated in great abun-dance, providing compact resource clustersof high-quality animal protein that is eas-ily and predictably procured and availablethroughout most, if not all, of the year. Shell-

fish provide a high-quality, predictable pro-tein source that contains all essential aminoacids and compares favorably with other an-imal species (Thomas 2008). Foragers work-ing the oyster beds were thus virtually as-sured of meeting subsistence requirements,even in lean times.

Labor could be flexibly adjusted;whereas hunters might have to travel far

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Figure 2. The randomized transect researchdesign employed in the island-widesurvey of St. Catherines Island (afterThomas 2008:fig. 20.1).

afield, shellfish remain available locally towomen, children, and elders, thereby ensur-ing a stable level of protein intake for off-spring. Most shellfish taxa are easy to find

and harvest, with high pursuit success rateand low variance. Hunting white-tailed deer,alligators, and loggerheads is failure-prone,but the failure rate for pursuing a stationaryshellfish approaches zero.

Among the Meriam of the Torres Strait,nerites and Asaphis clams are extremely lowranking, but they are collected in great num-bers when females forage with small chil-dren or when the tide covers the mid-littoral(both conditions effectively decreasing theencounter rate with higher ranked prey onthe reef flat). Bird et al. (2004) argue thatthis is explains the prevalence of these low-ranking shellfish resources in Meriam shellmiddens. The same holds true for the An-barra, for whom shellfish is one of the mostdependable food resources, even more reli-able than fishing. After all, “shellfish are therefor the taking, like the food on a supermarketshelf” (Meehan 1982:160), and the shellfishsupermarkets of St. Catherines Island flour-ished for millennia.

DEVELOPING COMPLEXITY

The first St. Catherines islanders manufac-tured the most ancient ceramics in NorthAmerica and were probably organized intoegalitarian, tribal-level societies living in eco-nomically self-sufficient, virtually sedentary,and politically autonomous villages.

Significant social, environmental, andecological change characterizes the earlyMississippian period (immediately follow-ing cal AD 800) with two salient and in-terrelated facts emerging. Hereditary in-equality became the order of the day,with the previous egalitarian social network(leadership-lacking inherited authority) giv-ing way to a ranked, despotic system of inher-ited asymmetry in leadership and social pres-tige (Thomas 2008:chap. 33; see also Flan-nery and Marcus 2012).

Whereas the rise of hierarchical soci-ety is typically linked to the emergence ofagriculture—and maize cultivation wouldeventually play an important role in thelives of aboriginal St. Catherines islanders—the bioarchaeological and paleobotanical ev-idence clearly demonstrates that the transi-tion to heritable social inequity took place

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within the context of shellfish foraging,which predated maize farming by sev-eral centuries (Larsen et al. 1992; Thomas2008).

While compelling, this is hardly shock-ing news. Anthropologists have long un-derstood that certain “complex” foragingpopulations developed heritable social in-equity (e.g., Bird and O’Connell 2006; Ken-nett 2005; Koyama and Thomas 1981). I ammore surprised that these complex shellfish-ers become farmers at all.

MISSISSIPPIAN INTENSIFICATION

Available archaeological proxies demon-strate that the human population of St.Catherines Island increased exponentiallyacross the millennia—effectively doublingduring the Mississippian interval—thendropped dramatically (if not catastrophi-cally) during the Spanish mission period(Thomas 2008). The archaeological recorddocuments two critical, interrelated dimen-sions of late Mississippian intensification—the expansion of patch selection and correl-ative adoption of maize agriculture.

Several measures suggest that late Mis-sissippian foragers began harvesting Easternoysters, hard clams, and catfishes from a sig-nificantly greater number of intertidal habi-tats and/or substrates. Diet breadth appar-ently did not change significantly during theprehistoric era, but some degree of resourcedepression was accompanied by an increasein transport costs for estuarine resources.With more people to feed, nearby shellfishbeds inevitably experienced greater harvest-ing pressure, forcing increasing reliance onmore distant, second-tier patch sets. Incre-mental analysis from multiple Mississippiansites demonstrates that the late Mississip-pian hard clam populations were generallyyounger than before (Bergh 2012a)—usuallyinterpreted as a sign of heavy harvesting(Quitmyer and Jones 2012). Equivalent-agehardclams inLateMississippianmiddensalsotended to be smaller than their early Mis-sissippian counterparts, suggesting harvestfrom less ideal substrates. Hard clams are alsoscarce in some Mississippian sites, suggest-

ing declining access to nearby, healthy clambeds (see also Rollins and Thomas 2011).

Bergh (2012a) documented a concomi-tant shift toward more communal fishingtechnologies that exploited different partsof the water column and/or more variedtidal habitats. It seems likely that owner-ship of fishing and shellfishing marshlandswas lineage-based (Worth 2004)—such pre-dictable, abundant, and stationary resourcesare typically both defensible and worth de-fending (Bergh 2012a; Dyson-Hudson andSmith 1978; Kennett 2005)—particularlyduring the Late Mississippian period.

Terrestrial farming provided anotherway to intensify provisioning strategies andFigure 3 models the diet-breadth implica-tions. Slash-and-burn horticulture has a re-markably low return rate (yielding 1100–1500 kcal/hr), effectively overlapping oys-ters and ribbed mussels, spearing small fish,hunting gray squirrels, and preparing acornmeal (after Barlow 2006; see also Thomas2008). Hunting rabbits and ducks, collect-ing clams, and preparing hickory nut oil rankhigher than maize cultivation, with only afew shellfish taxa and small seed harvestingrank lower. Depending on specific year-to-yearconditions, slash-and-burn farmingmusthave often generated lower caloric returnsthan most shellfishing and wild plant food-collecting options on St. Catherines Island.

Intensive maize horticulture is evenworse—with an energetic range of merely220–370 kcal/hr—implying a diet-breadthsufficiently broad to include the lowest rank-ing prey in the female foraging set (such asribbedmussels andperiwinkles). If energeticreturns were the only consideration, femaleforagers would do much better rendering oilfrom hickory nuts and acorns (in the fall) orcollecting hard clams (all year round) than bytending swidden fields throughout the agri-cultural cycle.

But significant maize consumption didindeed take place prior to the European ar-rival (Larsen et al. 1992; Thomas 2008), beg-ging the obvious question: If growing cornis less energy efficient than harvesting mostmarsh resources—and it certainly seems tobe—why did Late Mississippian foragers in-vest so heavily in maize cultivation?

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10,000

1,000

1000 5 10 15

Cal

oric

Ret

urn

Rat

es(K

cal

/hr)

Maize Harvest (Bu/Acre)

American alligator White-tailed

deer

22,000

12,096-19,895

Hard clams

Hickory nut oilAmerican oysters(singles)

Live oakacorn meal

Marshperiwinkles

Farming Strategies1. Plant & Harvest Maize 1300-1700

2. Slash & Burn Cultivation 1100-1500

3. “Typical” Agriculture 100-1100

4. Intensive Agriculture 50-350

26-135

390-1,260

2,250-4,400

2,100-2,200

1,000-1,700

Figure 3. Comparisons of estimated caloric re-turn rates from foraging and maizecultivation on St. Catherines Is-land (returns from cultivation mod-ified from Barlow 2002:fig. 5; afterThomas 2008:fig. 9.4).

WHY MAIZE?

We have ridiculed the twin myths that (a)shellfishers “always belong to the lowerclasses of society, and lead in this mannera primitive as well as simple life” (Uhle1907:31) and (b) maize cultivation is bothnecessary and sufficient for the developmentof hereditary social inequity, monumental ar-chitecture, and/or works of public art.

It is appropriate to recall Barlow’s admo-nition that “maize farming should be viewednot as a transition from ‘being’ a foragerto ‘being’ a farmer, but as the outcome ofa series of foraging decisions made at var-ious points throughout the growing sea-son” (Barlow 2006:97; see also Bettinger2006). Approaching maize horticulture as asequence of subsistence-related behaviors—analogous to hunting white-tailed deer, ren-dering “sweet oil” hickory nuts, or collect-ing hard clams—invites a focus on the self-interested individual’s expectations of antic-ipated yield relative to expected costs. Soviewed, individual foragers can be expectedto weigh the options of investing time in a

particular farming activity (such as prepar-ing the patch, sowing the seeds, weedingthe garden, and harvesting the ripened ears)against expected returns from net energygains available from (non-farming) foragingpursuits (Barlow 2006; see also Winterhalderand Goland 1997:126). These implications—to forage when you can and farm when youmust—situate maize horticulture not as a cul-tural complex or all-encompassing lifestyle,but rather as an amalgam of individual eco-nomic behaviors of varied intensity and com-plexity, each depending entirely on the cir-cumstances at hand.

So why would an individual forager electto grow corn instead of collecting moreenergy-producing hard clams and oysters?Is energy the right currency in this case? Isthe diet breadth model appropriate? Couldsocial considerations sometimes outweighstrictly provisioning strategies? Douglas Bird(quoted in Thomas 2008:987) suggests that“in our Meriam work (and now with theMartu) we were quite wrong to assume, asdoes the [prey-choice model], that the goalof all foraging is to maximize the efficiencyof foraging for food.”

Numerous investigators (e.g., BliegeBird and Smith 2005) have argued that “sym-bolic” behavior can confer significant fitness-related advantages, meaning that certain for-aging activities should be understood interms of their social and competitive value,rather than merely their nutritional contri-bution. I have argued elsewhere that pre-historic maize cultivation on St. CatherinesIsland can only be understood in light ofLate Mississippian sociopolitical structure;it may also be that the “social capital” or“signal value” of maize farming provided anew means of conveying information aboutsuccessful providers (Thomas 2008).

Instability is one of the key character-istics of Mississippian chiefdoms, with achiefly cycling of polities that rise in power,decline, and sometimes collapse altogetherwhile new centers of power crop up else-where (Anderson 1996; Blitz 1999). Theyears AD 900 through 1450 saw a progres-sive buildup of major Mississippian com-ponents in the Savannah River Basin. Then“something dramatic happened in the 15th

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century” (Anderson 1994:326), with a pro-nounced demographic drop-off likely dueto both environmental stress and a shiftingpolitical landscape. Anderson (1994) sug-gests that the development of the historicLower Cherokee towns might be the resultof 15th-century political dislocations alongthe Savannah River. Something similar hap-pened along the Georgia coastline where, al-most overnight, these same dislocations pro-pelled the complex foragers of St. Cather-ines Island into an intense regional polit-ical competition between the rival chief-doms of the Mississippian world—and thisis precisely when maize cultivation tookhold.

Although significant shellfishing wouldcontinue, St. Catherines Island foragers be-gan intensive maize farming at least by AD1400 or so (as amply documented by eth-nohistoric and archaeological evidence sum-marized in Thomas 2008:chap. 35). Lessthan two centuries later, the earliest Euro-pean explorers document the results of thischange. These foraging farmers were sow-ing, and cultivating designated sabana fieldsfor the elite—the cacique, the principales,the medicine man/woman, the interpreters,the ballplayers, and others deemed worthyof tribute. They maintained a large, commu-nal sabana to feed widows, orphans, andtravelers, to finance public feasts, and pro-vide rations for those working on construc-tion projects, long-distance trade, or militarycampaigns.

They maintained at least two administra-tive levels and a complex system of chieflytribute was well ensconced along the Geor-gia Bight (Worth 2004). Lesser elites paidtribute to higher ups—defining and formal-izing power relationship, both within andbetween chiefdoms “obsessed with statuspositions, alliances, and trade” (Anderson1994:77). The most productive terrestrialand estuarine resource patches were ownedby chiefly matrilineages, and subordinateswere required topay tributaryobligations forforaging rights (Worth 1998). Easy to store,transport, and quantify, maize became theprimary currency that fueled the Mississip-pian world, even among the shellfishers ofSt. Catherines Island.

To be sure, growing corn was less effi-cient and more expensive than shellfishing,and there was heightened risk due to thedroughts, torrential rains, insect infestationsand other factors that destroyed crops. Butthesocialcostsandbenefitsseemtohaveout-weighed concerns for net energy-efficientprovisioning. From the perspective of hu-man behavioral ecology, the collection oftribute, offerings, and taxes represented thesocial payment for the costs of performingrituals and conducting warfare for the polityas a whole—basically the cost of protectingthe group within their (culturally defined)global world system, as they then knew it.

We have suggested elsewhere that thefitness-related advantages of “social capi-tal” or “signal value” may also have pro-moted the cultivation of tributary maizefields at the expense of shellfishing (Thomas2008:1105–1107). Following Bliege Bird andSmith (2005:230), I have suggested that theLate Mississippians of St. Catherines Island—perhaps like modern Merriam sea turtlehunters—may have found that sociopolitical(“signaling”) considerations trumped net en-ergetics. In this matrilineal society, a Gualewoman might decide to bypass clam collect-ing in the marsh (a higher return activity withlittle attendant signaling value) to tend hersabana field both because (1) of its poten-tial to signal honestly of a woman’s ability toprovide for her family (2) while still takingon the costs of maize agriculture that allowsthe household to engage within the widersocial and political world. Successful cornfarming is impossible to fake, and the publicdisplay of maize products is there for all tosee—not only ripening stalks in the sabanasand also maize stores in the conspicuousbarbacoas (huge communal and privatelyowned granaries, typically supported by 7-to 8-foot polished poles). Perhaps this is whya women would elect to tend the chiefly sa-bana, despite the direct provisioning bene-fits afforded her own households.

SUMMARY

Salt-marsh fishing and terrestrial hunting arethe highest ranking hunt-types available toSt. Catherines Island foragers. Compared to

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these male activities, energetic returns fromshellfishing rank quite low.Butwhen viewedagainst female alternatives, oysters and hardclams rank near the top of available re-sources. Shellfish are reliable, generally easyto find, and available to women, children,and elders.

Late Archaic foragers on St. CatherinesIsland developed shellfishing practices thatlasted for thousands of years. These egali-tarian, tribal-level populations lived in low-mobility,politically autonomoussettlementsalong the marsh, sometimes constructingmassive shell rings and crafting the earli-est pottery in North America. Shortly afterAD 800, Early Mississippian populations hadbecome complex chiefdoms, characterizedby ranked, inherited social hierarchies. Thisshift took place wholly in the context of ashellfishing economy, several centuries be-fore the adoption of maize cultivation on theGeorgia coast.

Mississippian foragers could have re-sponded to exponential population growthby intensifying their subsistence practices inmultiple ways—likely cultivating more oys-ters, building more expensive and durablefish traps, clearing and burning more maturemaritime forest stands to increase procure-ment return rates of mast crops, leachingthe more expensive laurel oak acorns (toaugment live oak acorns), weaving betterfish nets, and building better dugouts. For-agersprobablyworkedharder,payinghigherprocurement and processing costs, while in-creasing their investments in creation and/ormaintenance of specialized technologies.About AD 1400, St. Catherines Island for-agers began to farm and consume significantquantities of maize, a decision more likelyconditioned by political than nutritional con-siderations.

But throughout, the St. Catherines Islandeconomy was grounded in shellfishing, with-out a detectible shift in diet breadth over5,000 years.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am extremely grateful to the Edward JohnNoble and St. Catherines Island founda-

tions for the long-term support of this re-search, and to Royce Hayes (Island Superin-tendent) who provided the logistics to makethis happen. I thank Lorann S.A. Pendleton,Diana Rosenthal, and Jennifer Steffey forassistance in preparing this manuscript.

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