Human Behavioral Ecology and the Complexities of Arctic Foodways

Human populations are well adapted to coastal environments across the Arctic and Subarctic (Figure 1.1). However, they frequently face difficult and unpredictable conditions that place a premium on the strategies people chose for subsistence, reproduction, and settlement. For example, extreme seasonality dramatically changes the Arctic landscape as sea ice freezes and thaws, and seasonal storminess in the Subarctic significantly restricts human movement and resource availability. Human behavioral ecology has been used to understand human-environmental dynamics across these environments in a variety of ways. In this chapter, we focus principally on the region between the ice-free North Pacific Ocean and the ice-dominated Arctic Ocean. This Beringian Corridor is a transect that captures much of the environmental and seasonal variability around the circumpolar Arctic and the Subarctic. It also captures diverse hunter-gatherer lifeways and resource availability. We review three key contributions of human behavioral ecology models to our understanding of past hunter-gatherer behavior in these places, including applications of the optimal foraging prey choice model to zooarchaeological datasets; paleodemographic approaches to reconstructing and interpreting fluctuations in the size and density of human populations; and use of the ideal-free distribution model to help us understand shifting settlement patterns in high latitudes.