Foraging, Farming and Coastal Adaptation in Late Prehistoric North Carolina

Dale Hutchinson provides a detailed bioarchaeological analysis exploring human adaptation in the estuary zone of North Carolina and the influence of coastal foraging during the late prehistoric transition to agriculture. He draws on observations of human skeletal remains to look at nutrition, disease, physical activity, morbidity, and mortality of coastal populations, focusing particularly on changes in nutrition and health associated with the move from foraging to farming. Hutchinson confronts the prevailing notion of a universal agricultural transition by documenting a more variable and complex process of change. Among his notable findings is that skeletal and dental markers long accepted as indicators of corn consumption in fact occur more frequently among coastal foragers than among interior agriculturalists. His research shows that men and women differed not only in their economic roles but in their diets as well and that outer coastal populations continued to rely on maritime resources without the adoption of corn after A.D. 800, a reliance that almost surely influenced their evolving lifestyle. The combination of original data, well-supported interpretation, and the breadth of evidence from many categories significantly advances our anthropological understanding of the lives of these first North Carolinians.