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HAYNES—RECONSTRUCTING HUMAN PREDATIONARCHEOLOGICAL METHODS FOR RECONSTRUCTINGHUMAN PREDATION ON TERRESTRIAL VERTEBRATESGARY HAYNESAnthropology Department, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada 89557 USAABSTRACT—Archeological interest in predation ranges from studies of the earliest evidence for human meateating,to attempts to understand the fossil record’s ambiguity about the meaning of associated animal bones andhuman artifacts. A number of quantitative measures are used to find the meaningful patterns in archeologicalassemblages, and taphonomic research has also provided analogs and comparative standards for interpreting humanbehavior based on the evidence for predation. The most important methods, approaches, and interests are discussedhere, using case studies to illustrate the way archeologists have thought about the record of humans as predators.INTRODUCTIONTHIS PAPER IS A SURVEY of methodsarcheologists use to recognize and analyze predationby humans. The literature is large and the issues ofinterpretation are complex; a quick topical scan likethis is not meant to seem authoritative or complete.Rather it is an entrée into a varied and fascinatingsubfield of scholarship that has produced reviewsof the evidence (e.g., Behrensmeyer, 1987), casestudies, and reconsidered interpretations (Stanfordand Bunn, 2001).Archeologists have two main interests inpredation. One is in distinguishing active huntingfrom the more passive process of scavenging, onegoal being to find the beginning of predation, andanother goal being to understand foraging patternsthroughout all of prehistory. The two different foodprocurement tactics are widely thought todistinguish pre-human from modern humanbehavior over the long course of human evolution(see Klein, 2000; Stiner, 1990; also see thereferences in Stiner, 1991). Another main interestis in modeling human economic activities thatinfluence and are affected by predation, such asfood-getting technology or social organization.Prehistoric human groups colonized and lived inmany different habitats, and the technologicaldemands of predation in each habitat wereextremely diverse. Details about prehistoric groupfissioning and fusing, the scheduling of economicactivities, and the methods used to exchangeforaging information can be partly recoveredthrough careful analyses of archeological evidencefrom predation patterns.Other kinds of interest in predation aresometimes seen in the archeological literature aswell—such as the effort to understand whethercannibalism ever provided a non-negligible amountof calories to the human diet, and the desire torecognize murder and mass killings as special casesof predation. There is also an interest in trying todefine the extent of carnivore predation onhominids throughout prehistory.Laughlin (1968, p. 304) proposed that huntingis “the master behavior pattern of the humanspecies.” But hunting is a risky and oftenunsuccessful activity, and human hunter-gatherersin recent times rarely get more than 30–50% of theircalories from animal tissues (Lee, 1968; see thereferences in Lee and DeVore, 1968). However, atdifferent times in prehistory, pre-industrial foragersapparently acquired far more. Richards et al. (2000)provide a late Pleistocene example in which isotopicstudies of human bones from Britain demonstratedmuch more meat-eating than seen in ethnographicallydocumented (“recent”) non-industrial foragers.Stable-isotope studies of human bones can revealthe extent of meat-eating in prehistoric human diets,but unfortunately the huge majority of prehistoric51