Hunter-gatherer immediate-return systems: A case study from the mid-Holocene Elk Head site, Big Horn Basin, Wyoming

The classification of hunter-gatherer societies as immediate-return or delayed-return offers a framework to explore variation in their adaptive strategies. Immediate-return societies would have evidence of limited food storage, sharing of resources, and high residential mobility. Archaeological attributes of an immediate-return society include the absence of formal storage facilities, artifact refits among dwellings indicating the sharing of resources, circular dwellings of small diameter, closely spaced dwellings, low density of artifacts without middens, low diversity of tools, generalized tools, and bifacial tools. The Elk Head site in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming provides an excellent opportunity to test the hypothesis that the site represents an immediate-return system. The results indicate that households at the site followed a variation of an immediate return adaptive strategy. The site inhabitants constructed basin dwellings in anticipation of later reuse and probably baked geophytes, mostly for immediate consumption as an adaptation to the dry mid-Holocene climate.