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Comment upon the Economic Potential of Fish Utilization in Riverine Environments and Potential Archaeological Biases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Adam G. Garson
Adam G. Garson*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520
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Abstract

New data from the South American lowland tropics are used in support of a recent argument extolling the potential of fish utilization in major floodplains. The discussion will cover five points: (1) major floodplains in general, and the Amazon and Orinoco floodplains in particular, have similar characteristics that make them biologically productive regions; (2) high fish productivity and the use of mass-fishing techniques in floodplain regions are characteristics of lowland South America; (3) the ecological dynamics of the seasonally inundated savanna are particularly productive and propitious for seasonal exploitation using mass-fishing techniques; (4) differences in species composition and fish size may have implications for seasonal and spatial variations in fish exploitation; and (5) substantial biases are apparent against the retrieval of small fish remains using traditional archaeological recovery techniques.

Type
Comments
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , July 1980 , pp. 562 - 567
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 1980 

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