The UMMAA Brown Bag Lecture Series is pleased to present a lecture by Dr. Raven Garvey, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and curator of High Latitude and Western North American Archaeology at UMMAA. Garvey’s lecture, "Human Consumption of Large Herbivore Digesta and its Implication for Foraging Theory," will be held on Friday, March 22, 12-1 p.m. in Room 1315 in the School of Education Building.
Vegetal matter undergoing digestion in herbivores’ stomachs and intestines, digesta, can be an important source of dietary carbohydrates for human foragers. Digesta significantly increases large herbivores’ total caloric yield and broadens their nutritional profile to include three key macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrates) in amounts sufficient to sustain small foraging groups for multiple days without supplementation. Including this underappreciated resource in our foraging hypotheses and models can substantively change their predictions. In this talk, Garvey explores the foraging implications of digesta in two contexts—sex-divided subsistence labor and archaeologically observed increases in plant use and sedentism—using estimates of available protein and carbohydrates in the native tissues and digesta, respectively, of a large ruminant herbivore (Bison bison).
The Museum's Brown Bag Lecture Series is free and open to the public.
