Why foragers choose acorns before salmon: Storage, mobility, and risk in aboriginal California

Despite the enormous potential of anadromous fish, foragers do not mass extract and store salmonids until very late in the archaeological record of California. Acorns, by contrast, were intensively used quite early in the record. Salmon are traditionally viewed as a low cost, high ranking resource, and acorns as a high cost, low ranking resource. The question thus arises: why were salmon not used and stored en masse much earlier? We offer a solution using a simple foraging model that distinguishes resources on their storage as well as overall cost, making it possible to calculate the risk of resource caching, which appears to have delayed intensive salmon procurement in California. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.