A MULTIDECADAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE FREMONT FORAGING-FARMING TRANSITION IN EASTERN UTAH, USA (Invited Presentation)

The foraging-farming transition is among the important moments in human history that shifted social scales from the communal, egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherers to the corporate, hierarchical organization of agriculturalists. While this transition happened repeatedly at disparate global locations, the environmental controls remain largely unknown because archaeologists rely on poorly resolved non-local and non-terrestrial proxies. Knowing these controls matters because people made critical economic decisions over the span of generations, a difficult frame of reference to achieve in archaeology and paleoecology. In western North America, the Fremont foraging-farming transition offers important insights as it occurred during a relatively narrow and recent window of time, ca. AD 300-1300. I present a case study from Utah’s northern Uinta Basin integrating an annually resolved precipitation reconstruction with a Bayesian radiocarbon age model that constrains key moments in the 1000-year history of an agricultural community. The adoption of maize occurred within a context of peak year-to-year precipitation variability facilitating development of a successful low-level maize investment strategy that buffered the dominant ~30-120-year drought regime. Maize intensification, formation of pithouse communities, and emergent social hierarchies corresponded with breakdown of precipitation variability during a 300-year window from AD 750-1050. The Fremont community quickly returned to a low-level maize investment strategy with the return of the dominant ~30-120-year drought regime after AD 1050 and until agriculture ended around AD 1300. Fremont forager-farmers made economic decisions designed to buffer environmental variability and create ecologically resilient communities that avoided tipping points into the high-investment and less sustainable agricultural practices known from other global agricultural societies.