JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD AND THEORY
DOI: 10.1007/s10816-011-9121-4

On Behavioral Depression in White-tailed Deer

Steve Wolverton, Lisa Nagaoka, Pinliang Dong and James H. Kennedy

Researchers combined zooarchaeological data and inferences about shifts in hunting pressure on white-tailed deer in southeast Texas at the Eagle's Ridge site during the middle to late Holocene with behavioral ecology inferences drawn from home-range data from a modern deer study in central Texas. The main conclusions are that deer cognitively map home ranges at discrete and small spatial scales and that their high fidelity to those home ranges would have made them vulnerable to over-harvest, which appears to have occurred as human population density increased during prehistory in southeast Texas.