Douglas W Bird
Biographic Data
| ID | 3643752 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Douglas W Bird |
| GIVEN NAMES | Douglas W |
| FAMILY NAME | Bird |
| SIGNATURE | BIRD D W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 934 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Why Do Humans Hunt Cooperatively: Ethnohistoric Data Reveal the Contexts, Advantages, and Evolutionary Importance of Communal Hunting
We analyze a new ethnographic and ethnohistoric database of quantitative cases (n = 139) and qualitative information on a neglected form of forager subsistence—communal drive hunts (CDHs)—using a human behavioral ecology perspective. Among our key findings are that (i) in specific contexts, CDHs achieve higher return rates or lower odds of failure than encounter hunting; (ii) CDHs increase the rate of success for hunting large ungulates that clus…
Regenerative landscape design: An Integrative Framework to Enhance Sustainability Planning
Addressing contemporary environmental and social crises requires solutions-based, systems-level changes. To achieve these changes, transdisciplinary research approaches are needed to align problem framing with solution deployment at landscape scales. However, practical frameworks to guide this work are lacking. Here we propose a new framework to help bridge this gap: regenerative landscape design (RLD). We define RLD as a process for finding patt…
Climate, landscape diversity, and food sovereignty in arid Australia: The firestick farming hypothesis
OBJECTIVE: Climate change has long been recognized as a significant driver of dietary diversity and dietary quality. An often overlooked aspect of climate change are shifts in fire regimes, which have the potential to drastically affect landscape diversity, species distributions, and ultimately, human diets. Here, we investigate whether the fire regimes shaped by Indigenous Australians change landscape diversity in ways that improve dietary quali…
Deconstructing Hunting Returns: Can We Reconstruct and Predict Payoffs from Pursuing Prey
Mass procurement and prey rankings: Insights from the European rabbit
Subsistence Transitions and the Simplification of Ecological Networks in the Western Desert of Australia
Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies
Mosaics of fire and water: The co-emergence of anthropogenic landscapes and intensive seed exploitation in the Australian arid zone
In arid Australia, the antiquity, role and ecological contexts of ‘firestick’ farming in seed-based foraging economies remain unclear. We use Landsat imagery to analyse effects of contemporary Martu hunting fires on seed-bearing grasses and forbs. Today, Martu rarely harvest wild seeds but inadvertently foster patches of grass when they burn to hunt burrowing monitor lizards. Therefore, anthropogenic seed patches need only be by-products of fires…
Mobility, subsistence, and technological strategies of early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Bolivian Altiplano
Martu ethnoarchaeology: Foraging ecology and the marginal value of site structure
The roots of the question: Surprise Valley, Alyawarra, and the early development of James F. O’Connell’s ethnoarchaeology
Shellfishing and human evolution
A Landscape Architecture of Fire: Cultural Emergence and Ecological Pyrodiversity in Australia’s Western Desert
Aboriginal foraging systems in Australia's Western Desert have been structured around landscape-burning practices for millennia. These systems are mediated at one end by factors that influence an immediate-return economy and at the other by the way that burning transforms vegetative succession and habitat heterogeneity (pyrodiversity). The distinctive pyrodiversity of anthropogenic landscapes are where Martu insist that they and their estates are…
Pyrodiversity and the anthropocene: The Role of Fire in the Broad Spectrum Revolution
The Anthropocene colloquially refers to a global regime of human-caused environmental modification of earth systems associated with profound changes in patterns of human mobility, as well as settlement and resource use compared with prior eras. Some have argued that the processes generating the Anthropocene are mainly associated with population growth and technological innovation, and thus began only in the late Holocene under conditions of dense…
Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science
Diesel and damper: Changes in seed use and mobility patterns following contact amongst the Martu of Western Australia
Conservation or Co-evolution? Intermediate Levels of Aboriginal Burning and Hunting Have Positive Effects on Kangaroo Populations in Western Australia
Bush Tucker, Shop Tucker: Production, Consumption, and Diet at an Aboriginal Outstation
Foraging models have rarely been used to address how behavior is altered by the presence of non-foraged foods. Here, choices of store-bought and hunted foods in one Aboriginal community are analyzed. Hunting occurs frequently, but community residents also purchase food from the shop. Increases in the frequency of hunting certain large and small prey are associated with reduced access to food in the shop. Higher-variance hunt types are not associa…
Global Patterns in the Exploitation of Shellfish
Shellfish are a crucial resource for past and present subsistence-level societies around the world. Despite the diversity of environments in which shellfish are exploited, an examination of the global patterns of shellfish exploitation reveal surprisingly common patterns in the opportunities allowed and constraints imposed by relying on shellfish. These commonalities, linked to the fundamental features of shellfish and their exploitation, can ill…
Shellfishing and the Colonization of Sahul: A Multivariate Model Evaluating the Dynamic Effects of Prey Utility, Transport Considerations and Life-History on Foraging Patterns and Midden Composition
Archaeological evidence of shellfish exploitation along the coast of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) points to an apparent paradox. While the continental record as a whole suggests that human populations were very low from initial colonization through early Holocene, coastal and peri-coastal sites dating to that time are dominated by small, low-ranked, littoral taxa to the near-complete exclusion of large, higher ranked, sub-littoral spe…
Megafauna in a continent of small game: Archaeological implications of Martu Camel hunting in Australia's Western Desert
Forward: A Global Perspective on Traditional Burning in California
An annual fire season that threatens lives, property, and livelihoods has become the norm in California. Unfortunately, it is likely to get worse before it gets better: global climate change may in
The hierarchy of virtue: Mutualism, altruism and signaling in Martu women's cooperative hunting
Risky Pursuits: Martu Hunting and the Effects of Prey Mobility: Reply to Ugan and Simms
We recently demonstrated that prey size is not a reliable predictor of post-encounter return rates for resources Martu hunters regularly handle in Australia’s Western Desert (Bird et al. 2009). Ugan and Simms are skeptical of our calculations of these returns, especially in our inclusion of tracking as pursuit time. Here we review how these variables were recorded and calculated, update the analysis with more data, and clarify the importance of p…
Interpreting abundance indices: Some zooarchaeological implications of Martu foraging
Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology
Why Women Hunt: Risk and Contemporary Foraging in a Western Desert Aboriginal Community
An old anthropological theory ascribes gender differences in hunter-gatherer subsistence to an economy of scale in household economic production: women pursue child-care-compatible tasks and men, of necessity, provision wives and offspring with hunted meat. This theory explains little about the division of labor among the Australian Martu, where women hunt extensively and gendered asymmetry in foraging decisions is linked to men's and women's dif…
Contemporary Shellfish Gathering Strategies among the Meriam of the Torres Strait Islands, Australia: Testing Predictions of a Central Place Foraging Model
Delayed Reciprocity and Tolerated Theft: The Behavioral Ecology of Food-Sharing Strategies
Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science
Explaining Shellfish Variability in Middens on the Meriam Islands, Torres Strait, Australia
Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies
In Pursuit of Mobile Prey: Martu Hunting Strategies and Archaeofaunal Interpretation
By integrating foraging models developed in behavioral ecology with measures of variability in faunal remains, zooarchaeological studies have made important contributions toward understanding prehistoric resource use and the dynamic interactions between humans and their prey. However, where archaeological studies are unable to quantify the costs and benefits associated with prey acquisition, they often rely on proxy measures such as prey body siz…
Constraints of knowing or constraints of growing: Fishing and collecting by the children of mer
Aboriginal Burning Regimes and Hunting Strategies in Australia's Western Desert
Children on the reef: Slow learning or strategic foraging
A Landscape Architecture of Fire: Cultural Emergence and Ecological Pyrodiversity in Australia’s Western Desert
Aboriginal foraging systems in Australia's Western Desert have been structured around landscape-burning practices for millennia. These systems are mediated at one end by factors that influence an immediate-return economy and at the other by the way that burning transforms vegetative succession and habitat heterogeneity (pyrodiversity). The distinctive pyrodiversity of anthropogenic landscapes are where Martu insist that they and their estates are…
Mass procurement and prey rankings: Insights from the European rabbit
Pyrodiversity and the anthropocene: The Role of Fire in the Broad Spectrum Revolution
The Anthropocene colloquially refers to a global regime of human-caused environmental modification of earth systems associated with profound changes in patterns of human mobility, as well as settlement and resource use compared with prior eras. Some have argued that the processes generating the Anthropocene are mainly associated with population growth and technological innovation, and thus began only in the late Holocene under conditions of dense…
Diesel and damper: Changes in seed use and mobility patterns following contact amongst the Martu of Western Australia
Shellfishing and the Colonization of Sahul: A Multivariate Model Evaluating the Dynamic Effects of Prey Utility, Transport Considerations and Life-History on Foraging Patterns and Midden Composition
Archaeological evidence of shellfish exploitation along the coast of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) points to an apparent paradox. While the continental record as a whole suggests that human populations were very low from initial colonization through early Holocene, coastal and peri-coastal sites dating to that time are dominated by small, low-ranked, littoral taxa to the near-complete exclusion of large, higher ranked, sub-littoral spe…
Interpreting abundance indices: Some zooarchaeological implications of Martu foraging
Deconstructing Hunting Returns: Can We Reconstruct and Predict Payoffs from Pursuing Prey
What Explains Differences in Men's and Women's Production: Determinants of Gendered Foraging Inequalities among Martu
Mosaics of fire and water: The co-emergence of anthropogenic landscapes and intensive seed exploitation in the Australian arid zone
In arid Australia, the antiquity, role and ecological contexts of ‘firestick’ farming in seed-based foraging economies remain unclear. We use Landsat imagery to analyse effects of contemporary Martu hunting fires on seed-bearing grasses and forbs. Today, Martu rarely harvest wild seeds but inadvertently foster patches of grass when they burn to hunt burrowing monitor lizards. Therefore, anthropogenic seed patches need only be by-products of fires…
Behavioral Ecology and the Archaeological Consequences of Central Place Foraging among the Meriam
Archaeology is ultimately concerned with explaining variability in the patterns of past human behavior. This chapter illustrates how archaeologically falsifiable hypotheses derived from the neo-Darwinian framework of behavioral ecology can serve this goal. Most archaeological applications of this approach have focused on explaining differences in the material consequences of subsistence practices with reference to the general predictions of the e…
Mobility, subsistence, and technological strategies of early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Bolivian Altiplano
Global Patterns in the Exploitation of Shellfish
Shellfish are a crucial resource for past and present subsistence-level societies around the world. Despite the diversity of environments in which shellfish are exploited, an examination of the global patterns of shellfish exploitation reveal surprisingly common patterns in the opportunities allowed and constraints imposed by relying on shellfish. These commonalities, linked to the fundamental features of shellfish and their exploitation, can ill…
Why Do Humans Hunt Cooperatively: Ethnohistoric Data Reveal the Contexts, Advantages, and Evolutionary Importance of Communal Hunting
We analyze a new ethnographic and ethnohistoric database of quantitative cases (n = 139) and qualitative information on a neglected form of forager subsistence—communal drive hunts (CDHs)—using a human behavioral ecology perspective. Among our key findings are that (i) in specific contexts, CDHs achieve higher return rates or lower odds of failure than encounter hunting; (ii) CDHs increase the rate of success for hunting large ungulates that clus…
Risky Pursuits: Martu Hunting and the Effects of Prey Mobility: Reply to Ugan and Simms
We recently demonstrated that prey size is not a reliable predictor of post-encounter return rates for resources Martu hunters regularly handle in Australia’s Western Desert (Bird et al. 2009). Ugan and Simms are skeptical of our calculations of these returns, especially in our inclusion of tracking as pursuit time. Here we review how these variables were recorded and calculated, update the analysis with more data, and clarify the importance of p…
Contemporary Shellfish Gathering Strategies among the Meriam of the Torres Strait Islands, Australia: Testing Predictions of a Central Place Foraging Model
The science of foragers: Evaluating Variability Among Hunter-Gatherers
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Behavioral Ecology and the Archaeological Consequences of Central Place Foraging among the Meriam
Archaeology is ultimately concerned with explaining variability in the patterns of past human behavior. This chapter illustrates how archaeologically falsifiable hypotheses derived from the neo-Darwinian framework of behavioral ecology can serve this goal. Most archaeological applications of this approach have focused on explaining differences in the material consequences of subsistence practices with reference to the general predictions of the e…
Delayed Reciprocity and Tolerated Theft: The Behavioral Ecology of Food-Sharing Strategies
The Ethnoarchaeology of Juvenile Foragers: Shellfishing Strategies among Meriam Children
The hunting handicap: Costly signaling in human foraging strategies
Risk and reciprocity in Meriam food sharing
Explaining Shellfish Variability in Middens on the Meriam Islands, Torres Strait, Australia
Constraints of knowing or constraints of growing: Fishing and collecting by the children of mer
Children on the reef: Slow learning or strategic foraging
Evolutionary and Ecological Understandings of the Economics of Desert Societies Comparing the Great Basin USA and the Australian Deserts
This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Background Discussion Adaptation: A Key Concept Subsistence Strategies Hypotheses about Subsistence Variability HBE in Desert Australia HBE in the Great Basin Conclusion References
Aboriginal Burning Regimes and Hunting Strategies in Australia's Western Desert
Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology
The “fire stick farming” hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal foraging strategies, biodiversity, and anthropogenic fire mosaics
Aboriginal burning in Australia has long been assumed to be a “resource management” strategy, but no quantitative tests of this hypothesis have ever been conducted. We combine ethnographic observations of contemporary Aboriginal hunting and burning with satellite image analysis of anthropogenic and natural landscape structure to demonstrate the processes through which Aboriginal burning shapes arid-zone vegetational diversity. Anthropogenic lands…
Why Women Hunt: Risk and Contemporary Foraging in a Western Desert Aboriginal Community
An old anthropological theory ascribes gender differences in hunter-gatherer subsistence to an economy of scale in household economic production: women pursue child-care-compatible tasks and men, of necessity, provision wives and offspring with hunted meat. This theory explains little about the division of labor among the Australian Martu, where women hunt extensively and gendered asymmetry in foraging decisions is linked to men's and women's dif…
What Explains Differences in Men's and Women's Production: Determinants of Gendered Foraging Inequalities among Martu
In Pursuit of Mobile Prey: Martu Hunting Strategies and Archaeofaunal Interpretation
By integrating foraging models developed in behavioral ecology with measures of variability in faunal remains, zooarchaeological studies have made important contributions toward understanding prehistoric resource use and the dynamic interactions between humans and their prey. However, where archaeological studies are unable to quantify the costs and benefits associated with prey acquisition, they often rely on proxy measures such as prey body siz…
Interpreting abundance indices: Some zooarchaeological implications of Martu foraging
The hierarchy of virtue: Mutualism, altruism and signaling in Martu women's cooperative hunting
Risky Pursuits: Martu Hunting and the Effects of Prey Mobility: Reply to Ugan and Simms
We recently demonstrated that prey size is not a reliable predictor of post-encounter return rates for resources Martu hunters regularly handle in Australia’s Western Desert (Bird et al. 2009). Ugan and Simms are skeptical of our calculations of these returns, especially in our inclusion of tracking as pursuit time. Here we review how these variables were recorded and calculated, update the analysis with more data, and clarify the importance of p…
Megafauna in a continent of small game: Archaeological implications of Martu Camel hunting in Australia's Western Desert
Forward: A Global Perspective on Traditional Burning in California
An annual fire season that threatens lives, property, and livelihoods has become the norm in California. Unfortunately, it is likely to get worse before it gets better: global climate change may in
Conservation or Co-evolution? Intermediate Levels of Aboriginal Burning and Hunting Have Positive Effects on Kangaroo Populations in Western Australia
Bush Tucker, Shop Tucker: Production, Consumption, and Diet at an Aboriginal Outstation
Foraging models have rarely been used to address how behavior is altered by the presence of non-foraged foods. Here, choices of store-bought and hunted foods in one Aboriginal community are analyzed. Hunting occurs frequently, but community residents also purchase food from the shop. Increases in the frequency of hunting certain large and small prey are associated with reduced access to food in the shop. Higher-variance hunt types are not associa…
Global Patterns in the Exploitation of Shellfish
Shellfish are a crucial resource for past and present subsistence-level societies around the world. Despite the diversity of environments in which shellfish are exploited, an examination of the global patterns of shellfish exploitation reveal surprisingly common patterns in the opportunities allowed and constraints imposed by relying on shellfish. These commonalities, linked to the fundamental features of shellfish and their exploitation, can ill…
Biology (34 works) · Geography (31 works) · Ecology (30 works) · Foraging (21 works) · Archaeology (18 works) · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation (17 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (15 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (12 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (11 works) · Subsistence agriculture (11 works)