Modeling Modes of Hunter-Gatherer Food Storage

Analyses of the capacity and rates of different acorn storage techniques employed by the Western Mono of California’s Sierra Nevada during the very late Holacene indicate hunter-gatherers store food in at least three main modes: central-place storage, dispersed caching, and dispersed bulk caching. The advantage of caching modes over central-place ones is that they entail faster storage rates and thus the chance to maximize storage capacity when seasonality and scheduling conflicts limit storing opportunities. They also result in predictable stores of acorn separate from winter population aggregations but oftentimes near seasonally occupied camps. Central-place storage thus appears most directly related to coping with single-year seasonal variability in environmental productivity and sedentary overwintering strategies; caching, and especially bulk caching, with multi-year environmental unpredictability, overwintering and seasonal residential moves. Storage thus appears to generally develop as a response to seasonality and unpredictable environmental productivity, but its various forms are conditioned mainly by how they articulate with different mobility types. Complex Mono storage behaviors, however, were associated with regionally low population densities and relatively uncomplicated social structures nonetheless characterized by chiefs who maintained their positions by throwing feasts of stored acorn. The connections between storage, population density, and sociocultural complexity thus appear less direct and predicated on specific sociopolitical circumstance. Recognizing different modes of hunter-gatherer storage is consequently critical to assessing the roles ecology, mobility, group size, and social distinctions play in the development of disparate storage behaviors.