Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation reports on the work of three studies examining the motivations behind large game hunting and aspects of prehistoric technology employed in this pursuit. The first study presents a model predicting the value of costly signaling hunting in relation to opportunity costs and quality dependency, and how this value will affect the participation of hunters across different skill levels. The model is initially explored with Merriam spearfishing data and then applied to an analysis of Hadza large game hunting from two different study groups. Predictions of the model are primarily met by observations of Hadza large game hunting, with participation increasing as costliness decreased. The second study applies the signaling model to two aspects of large game hunting in the prehistoric Great Basin. First, two previously presented hypotheses providing explanations for late Holocene artiodactyl hunting are evaluated using predictions from the signaling model and tested with faunal data from Hogup Cave, Utah. The analysis finds that predation pressure of artiodactyls likely decreased during the late Holocene, supporting the hypothesis that more favorable climate conditions, as opposed to social conditions favoring signaling, were responsible for changes in artiodactyl hunting. The study also examines the adoption of bow and arrow technology and its effects on signaling hunting predicted by the model, finding that this technology would have lowered the value of signaling hunting through a decrease in both cost and quality dependency. The final chapter evaluates the hypothesis of projectile mass optimization to prey size through an analysis of projectile points and faunal material recovered from four stratified cave and rockshelter archaeological sites in the Great Basin. Over 1,000 projectile points are photographed, analyzed with photogrammetry, and compared to large game faunal data from the sites. The study finds that projectile point size, as measured by multiple attributes, is not predicted to increase with mean large game size. In several cases, dart and arrow attributes decrease at a statistically significant level with mean large game size. Rather than providing support for the inverse of the hypothesized relationship, this is found to be likely due to covariation between point morphology, game size, and time