Ethnography, Archaeology, Taphonomy

Rodents were hunted and eaten in many Indigenous communities in the American Southwest (Gnabasik 1981; Szuter 1991). Woodrats (Neotoma sp.) and terrestrial squirrels (e.g., prairie dogs, ground squirrels) were the taxa most often noted by ethnographers. Rodents were sometimes the bycatch of communal hunts for lagomorphs, but there were also specific hunting methods for rodents. Rodents were clearly acceptable as food, and they seem to have been consumed routinely.

Direct archaeological evidence for rodent exploitation includes the following: rodent bones in human coprolites (Clary 1987, 786–787), patterned burning on cranial and limb bones resulting from roasting carcasses over a fire (Badenhorst 2008; Driver 1985, 1991; Henshilwood 1997; Shaffer 1992a; Vigne and Marinval-Vigne 1983), and population structure data (Speth 2000). While these indications are rare in rodents, they are also rare in other small mammals that are widely assumed to have been hunted for food, such as cottontail rabbits.

Some analysts have downplayed the role of rodents in diets because of uncertainty as to how they became part of faunal assemblages. Rodents may have been deposited on sites without human intervention because (a) they may have been commensal—living and dying on humanly occupied sites—but not exploited; (b) rodents are attracted to depopulated sites for food and shelter (Lanoë et al. 2020); (c) rodent bones may be remains of the prey of carnivores and raptors that denned or roosted at depopulated sites. Another analytical problem is that recovery methods may produce unrepresentative samples (Shaffer 1992b), hindering taphonomic assessment. Direct dating of small mammal bones at one Southwest site, the Robinson Site (LA46326), showed that some rodents are contemporary with human occupation of the site, whereas rodent skeletons from burrows are later (Driver 1991).

Theoretical Considerations

A widely used concept in subsistence studies in the American Southwest is the “garden hunting” hypothesis, originally developed to explain faunal assemblages in archaeological sites of tropical horticulturalists (Linares 1976). Many Southwest zooarchaeologists have cited this hypothesis and suggested that fields and gardens attracted animals that could then be hunted. The cited benefits of garden hunting include a more concentrated prey biomass than would occur naturally, efficient use of time and labor by combining hunting with agricultural activities, and protection of crops by removing competitor pests. Reviews of the concept can be found in R. M. Dean (2007, 2017), J. C. Driver (2011), J. C. Driver and S. Badenhorst (2017), R. D. Leonard (1989), S. W. Neusius (1996), and C. R. Szuter (1991).

One problem in transferring the garden hunting hypothesis to the American Southwest is that it is not grounded explicitly in theory. As Leonard (1989) noted, most of the species that would be attracted to Southwest gardens could also be found in surrounding natural habitats, and there was generally no change in selection of animal species in the shift from foraging to agriculture. This is quite different from the situation described by O. F. Linares (1976), who wanted to explain the absence from archaeological assemblages in Panama of many species that would have been available in tropical forests outside the gardens. For the American Southwest, the garden hunting hypothesis fits well with ecologically oriented archaeological thinking of the 1970s, with its emphasis on systems theory, scheduling, homeostasis, and Indigenous land-management practices. However, it does not tell us under what conditions people would choose to hunt in gardens, nor does it provide any basis for making and testing predictions about archaeological signatures for garden hunting when the range of species does not change.

We use optimal foraging theory (OFT), particularly logic from the patch choice model to address this issue (Charnov et al. 1976; Stephens and Krebs 1986). Use of OFT in zooarchaeology has generally emphasized prey body size as an indicator of foraging efficiency, because large prey typically provides the highest returns per foraging costs. The prey choice model holds that if the abundance of large prey declines, there will be a shift toward greater incorporation of medium and small prey animals in the diet (Broughton 1994; Nagaoka 2001, 2002), a phenomenon seen in the San Juan Drainage Basin generally and the central Mesa Verde region in particular (Badenhorst and Driver 2009; Driver 2002; Schollmeyer and Driver 2013, Schollmeyer and Driver, chapter 21 in this volume).

The prey choice model does not examine the cost of ignoring low-ranked resources that could be obtained in the same location as high-ranked resources. In contrast, the patch choice model suggests that foragers will remain in a patch (any given area of space) as long as the resource return for that patch is greater than the average return for all patches. In the northern San Juan / Mesa Verde region, farming became increasingly important over time from the late Basketmaker periods through the Pueblo periods (Kohler et al. 2008). L. J. Ellyson et al. (2019, 64) argue that this practice led to an increase in the importance of the “food production foraging patch,” or what others term garden hunting (e.g., Schollmeyer and Driver 2012).

As gardens and fields became increasingly important, people would have spent greater amounts of time and energy there. If small game became sufficiently available to the point that they were an easy-to-acquire, routinely encountered animal resource within gardens, the logic of the patch choice model holds that foragers would have shifted to hunting in those patches if the average returns became higher than more distant wild game patches. R. M. Dean (2017) makes the same case for southern Arizona Hohokam communities.

We test this hypothesis for the central Mesa Verde region using data from sites excavated over many decades by Crow Canyon. Because the garden hunting hypothesis suggests that rodents should be targeted as pests (see Sundjordet 2017), and because the addition of rodents to the list of resources extractable from the garden patch would increase the productivity of the patch, the hypothesis that we test is that there should be increased use of rodents over time in the central Mesa Verde region.

Small mammals are common in the central Mesa Verde region. Mesa Verde National Park hosts 3 species of Leporidae (cottontails and jack rabbits), 13 species of Cricetidae (voles, woodrats, and mice), 1 species of Geomyidae (pocket gophers), 3 species of Heteromyidae (kangaroo rats and pocket mice), and 15 species of Sciuridae (ground squirrels, chipmunks and prairie dogs). Nutritional and ecological characteristics of some taxa are listed in table 20.1, and comparisons to larger game are also made.

Table 20.1. Examples of population densities and nutritional value of small and large game.

Note: Calories, protein, and fat expressed as grams per 100g. Return rate rounded to nearest thousand calories per hour. Data from Baker et al. (2003), Best (1996), Chapman and Willner (1978), Cully et al. (1997), Simms (1985), Smith (1991), Vangilder and Kurzejeski (1995), White (1953), Yensen and Sherman (2003). Nutritional data from USDA National Nutrient Database. NA = Not Applicable

Methods

Crow Canyon projects have recovered fauna from numerous sites and different time periods in the central Mesa Verde region (table 20.2). Field methods have been consistent, and recording protocols have largely followed the methods established by Driver and his students (Driver 2005).

Rather than present rodent number of identified specimens (NISP) as a percentage of the whole assemblage, we have quantified rodents as a percentage of the rodent plus lagomorph assemblage, in two ways. First, we look at all rodents that are smaller than beaver or porcupine, designated “R” in table 20.2. Second, because it seems most likely that preferred rodent prey would have been larger species, and because the recovery and identification of smaller species (mice and voles) seemed quite variable, we have also calculated the ratio of rodents to lagomorphs only for Sciuridae (ground squirrels, chipmunks, and prairie dogs), Geomyidae (pocket gophers) and Neotoma sp. (wood rats), designated “MR” in table 20.2.

Table 20.2. Number of identified specimens (NISP) data on all rodents (R), medium rodents (MR), and lagomorphs (LAG), and percentages of rodents in the (R+LAG) and (MR+LAG) assemblages.

Note: All data, except for those from Goodman Point Pueblo and Goodman Point Community Testing (Ellyson 2014; Hoffman 2011; Winstead 2015), are from https://www.crowcanyon.org/index.php/access-our-research/site-reports-databases and accessed December 14, 2020.

Results

Whether there is an increase in use of rodents relative to lagomorphs through time is difficult to assess. We do not see such clear temporal patterns as the decline in artiodactyls and the increase in turkeys documented by Driver (2002) and K. G. Schollmeyer and Driver (2013, Schollmeyer and Driver, chapter 21 in this volume) for the Mesa Verde region and by Badenhorst and Driver (2009) for the wider San Juan Drainage Basin.

Some Pueblo III period sites, such as Sand Canyon Pueblo (Muir 2007) and the hamlets sampled in the Site Testing Program (Driver et al. 1999), do have relatively high percentages of rodents when compared to earlier sites, such as those in the Basketmaker Communities Project (Cates 2020). However, this pattern is not evident at other Pueblo III period sites, such as Goodman Point, Yellow Jacket (Muir and Driver 2003), Albert Porter (Badenhorst and Driver 2015), or Shields Pueblo (Rawlings and Driver 2015). Given the relatively high percentages in some Pueblo period III sites, it is possible that some communities focused more time and energy on garden hunting, but this was clearly not universal, because other Pueblo III period sites have rodent percentages that are relatively low.

Discussion and Conclusion

There may be several methodological reasons for our failure to find any strong evidence of increased use of rodents through time. First, we are not measuring absolute abundance but only abundance in relation to other taxa—in this case lagomorphs. It is therefore possible that the actual consumption of rodents increased through time, though at the same rate as increased consumption of lagomorphs. This would result in consistent rodent-to-lagomorph ratios, even if actual abundances increased.

Second, a more thorough taphonomic study of rodent remains is required. It is possible that some site locations are more attractive to rodents, resulting in a larger portion of the rodent assemblage resulting from nonhuman accumulation processes. Such variation might obscure trends in numbers of rodents hunted by people.

Third, the distance of fields to residences (Varien 1999) may influence the representation of rodent remains in faunal assemblages. If fields were close, people may have brought rodents back to prepare and consume. But when fields were more distant, more rodents may have been prepared and consumed away from these larger villages. If rodent pests killed in agricultural areas were consumed there, we would not be able to detect increased reliance on garden hunting by excavating residential sites. Most of the sites in our sample are residences, and some are larger than others, and this may account for some of the variation noted in our samples.

We cannot show that rodents increased in importance through time in the Mesa Verde region, but methodological issues described make it difficult to provide a thorough assessment of the garden hunting hypothesis. An alternative hypothesis is that ancestral Puebloan peoples increased the productivity of the “garden patch” by growing more maize and feeding it to domestic turkeys, whose bone collagen signals a high input of C₄ plants (Rawlings and Driver 2010). This would have created a more reliable source of meat (and also feathers). Interestingly, turkey is the only species that seems to have been introduced to the ancestral Puebloan diet after the “garden patch” was established, and that humanly created niche would have been vital to its survival.

The rise of turkey production may have obviated the need for intensification of garden hunting. This suggestion is consistent with what we see in early agricultural communities elsewhere in the world. For example, after large mammals were domesticated in the Near East, there was a gradual decline in the use of wild game in preceramic Neolithic communities (Vigne 2008, fig. 4), and the introduction of domestic crops and mammals as part of the “Neolithic package” in Atlantic Europe resulted in a rapid transition away from hunting and fishing (Vigne 2008, 188). This review leaves us with questions unanswered and new hypotheses to test. We encourage others to look more closely at rodent remains from sites in the Mesa Verde region.

Acknowledgments. We thank the many staff from Crow Canyon Archaeological Center for their support over many years.

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