Strontium (87Sr/86Sr) evidence for the geography of Indigenous deer hunting in the North Carolina Piedmont

Abstract

White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) were one of the most important resources available to prehistoric and historic Indigenous communities within the Southeast region of North America. Although archaeofaunal and ethnohistorical records indicate that the deer hunting practices were heavily impacted by European colonization and the subsequent development of the highly profitable deerskin trade, the impacts of these historical events on deer hunting practices, particularly its spatial organization, are poorly documented. Focusing specifically on the geography of deer hunting, this study uses strontium isotopes from archaeological deer teeth recovered from two settlement sequences within the North Carolina Piedmont to identify hunting territories exploited by Indigenous hunters from the Protohistoric to Late Contact periods (CE 1450 and 1710). These Sr data evidence spatially divergent patterns in the geographic scale of deer hunting in the Piedmont. Situating these contrasting geographic patterns within the broader sociocultural context of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this study highlights specific responses of Indigenous communities to colonialism and its reverberating impacts vis-à-vis deer exploitation.