Rachel Reckin

University of Cambridge, Division of Archaeology, Alumna

University of Wyoming, Anthropology, Alumna

University of Puget Sound, English, Alumna

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I received my PhD in Archaeology from St John's College, Cambridge in 2018. I am part of the 2014 class of Gates Cambridge Scholars. I am presently the Heritage Program Manager for Montana State Parks.

My research places me at the forefront of the burgeoning field of high elevation archaeology in the West. In my dissertation, I have assembled the first high elevation database large enough to test the common contention that ancient people used the Rockies as refugia from extreme climatic or population pressure at lower elevations.

My dissertation also considers three other foundational issues in high elevation and surface archaeology. First, I use stone tool collections from several major intermontane stratified sites to refine the Plains Typology for the mountains of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). Additionally, I use obsidian source data to consider whether mountain people were a single, unified group, or were represented by a variety of peoples divided by zones of social-boundary defense. And third, I use lithic raw material and tool types to consider how much of their seasonal round people were spending at high elevations in prehistory.

I obtained my BA in English from the University of Puget Sound in 2009, and my MA in Anthropology from the University of Wyoming in 2011. My Master's thesis was on ice patch archaeology all around the world, and the patterns of high altitude use suggested by artifacts found melting from the ice in recent years. As part of that project, I worked with Drs. Robert Kelly, Craig Lee and Pei-Lin Yu on a ground-breaking ice patch archaeology project in Glacier National Park, in collaboration with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and the Blackfeet Nation. This project was awarded the Department of the Interior's Partners in Conservation Award for tribal collaboration. I worked seasonally for the US Forest Service throughout my Bachelor's and Master's degree, and in 2011 I returned to work for the Forest Service full time, first as a Zoned District Archaeologist and then as an acting Forest Archaeologist on the Kootenai National Forest of Montana. I left that position to begin my PhD studies in 2014.
Supervisors: Dr. Philip Nigst, University of Cambridge and Dr. Robert L. Kelly, University of Wyoming
Address: St John's College
Cambridge
CB2 1TP

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Papers by Rachel Reckin

Mobility, autonomy and learning: could the transition from egalitarian to non-egalitarian social structures start with children?

Nearest neighbour travel time against population density. 2.1. BaYaka playgroups tend to consist ... more Nearest neighbour travel time against population density. 2.1. BaYaka playgroups tend to consist of a broad range of ages and genders. 2.2. Flowchart of potential relationships in egalitarian or non-egalitarian social structures. 2.3. Flowchart of potential relationships in egalitarian or non-egalitarian social structures. 3.1. Illustrative example of the possible effect of mixed-sibling co-residence on the relatedness of groups. 3.2. Number of camps in which the average household is permitted to live. 5.1. Composition and kinship relationships of five hunting crews in Wales. 6.1. A Hadza man whittling a bow. 6.2. A map of the distribution of hand spears and spearthrowers throughout Australia. 6.3. A map of the recent historic distribution of blowdart use throughout the Old World. 6.4. A map of the recent historic distribution of blowdart use throughout the Americas. 7.1. Delayed return as a composite category. 8.1. A sketch of an Elk secret society dancer among the Ogalala Sioux on the American Plains. 8.2. Bone flutes used to represent the voices of spirits in Californian secret society rituals. 8.3. The interior of an Egbo ritual house of the Ekoi tribe in Nigeria. 8.4. The interior of an Egbo ritual house at Akangba, Nigeria. 8.5. The 'Sorcerer' from Les Trois Frères Cave in France. 8.6. Small dolmen containing the skull of a high-ranking member of a secret society on Vanuatu. 8.7. One of the skull cups recovered from the Solutrean deposits in Le Placard. 9.1. Net Primary Productivity and Effective Temperature conditions for extant fisher-hunter-gatherers. 138-9 9.2. Spatio-temporal distributions of NPP and ET in Upper Palaeolithic Europe. 140-1 9.3. Number of days per year with (growing) temperatures above 0°C, 5°C and 10°C. 142-3 9.4. Reconstructed population densities. 9.5.

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Deep Freeze: Ice Patch Archaeology in Glacier National Park

An Alpine Archaeological Landscape in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Wyoming

The alpine archaeological record above 3000m of Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has received much l... more The alpine archaeological record above 3000m of Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has received much less research attention than the adjacent plains, basins, and foothills. We have been working in an area of NW Wyoming where dense surface stone tool scatters, stone features (including some of the highest elevation habitation stone circles in the region) are associated with dwindling ice patches that have yielded both perishable artifactual material and an array of wood and bone that provides information on past environments. Since 2014, a 175 ha area at elevations from roughly 3,200-3,500m has been inventoried from the artifact-based documentation perspective. Locational and basic descriptive data on nearly 20,000 items have been recorded and provide a glimpse of the complexity and diversity of this high elevation landscape. While there is indeed evidence of big game hunting, there are also indications that the area was used by residential groups in addition to task-specific hunting parties. Data from this inventory are examined in the context of regional landscape distributional patterns.

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Resiliency and loss: A case study of two clusters of high elevation ice patches in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, USA

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Archaic Period Obsidian Use in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: The 48PA551 Assemblage in Regional Context

Analysis of an Obsidian Source from the Cougar Pass Region of the Absaroka Mountain Range

Ice Patch Archaeology in Western North America

The SAA archaeological record, 2014

How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills? : A Meta-Ethnographic Review

Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 2017

Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Study... more Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide trends in how, when, and from whom hunter-gatherer children learn their subsistence skills. We perform a meta-ethnography, which allows us to systematically extract, summarize, and compare both quantitative and qualitative literature. We found 58 publications focusing on learning subsistence skills. Learning begins early in infancy, when parents take children on foraging expeditions and give them toy versions of tools. In early and middle childhood, children transition into the multi-age playgroup, where they learn skills through play, observa...

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Socioecology shapes child and adolescent time allocation in twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence forager societies

Scientific Reports

A key issue distinguishing prominent evolutionary models of human life history is whether prolong... more A key issue distinguishing prominent evolutionary models of human life history is whether prolonged childhood evolved to facilitate learning in a skill- and strength-intensive foraging niche requiring high levels of cooperation. Considering the diversity of environments humans inhabit, children’s activities should also reflect local social and ecological opportunities and constraints. To better understand our species’ developmental plasticity, the present paper compiled a time allocation dataset for children and adolescents from twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence forager societies (n = 690; 3–18 years; 52% girls). We investigated how environmental factors, local ecological risk, and men and women’s relative energetic contributions were associated with cross-cultural variation in child and adolescent time allocation to childcare, food production, domestic work, and play. Annual precipitation, annual mean temperature, and net primary productivity were not strongly associated...

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How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Social and Gender Norms? A Meta-Ethnographic Review

Cross-Cultural Research, 2017

Forager societies tend to value egalitarianism, cooperative autonomy, and sharing. Furthermore, f... more Forager societies tend to value egalitarianism, cooperative autonomy, and sharing. Furthermore, foragers exhibit a strong gendered division of labor. However, few studies have employed a cross-cultural approach to understand how forager children learn social and gender norms. To address this gap, we perform a meta-ethnography, which allows for the systematic extraction, synthesis, and comparison of quantitative and qualitative publications. In all, 77 publications met our inclusion criteria. These suggest that sharing is actively taught in infancy. In early childhood, children transition to the playgroup, signifying their increased autonomy. Cooperative behaviors are learned through play. At the end of middle childhood, children self-segregate into same-sex groups and begin to perform gender-specific tasks. We find evidence that foragers actively teach children social norms, and that, with sedentarization, teaching, through direct instruction and task assignment, replaces imitation ...

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Data for: Illuminating High Elevation Seasonal Occupational Duration Using Diversity in Lithic Raw Materials and Tool Types in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, USA

Hunter-gatherer children in the past: an archaeological review

Theoretical engagement and methodological innovations geared towards identifying the presence and... more Theoretical engagement and methodological innovations geared towards identifying the presence and activities of children in archaeological contexts has increased in pace over the last decade. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature pertaining to the archaeology of hunter-gatherer children. The review summarises methods and findings from 72 archaeological publications in a number of research areas that show material culture relating to childhood, including children’s playthings and tools, learning to flintknap, and their involvement in the making of marks, art and footprints. By drawing on diverse evidence from all inhabited continents, we explore the implications of these data for our understanding of the cultural variability and patterning of hunter-gatherer children in the deep past. The paper closes by discussing potential improvements to archaeological and anthropological methodologies which would progress our understanding of children as active and engaged mem...

How do hunter-gatherer children learn to make material culture? A meta-ethnographic review

Mountains as Crossroads: Temporal and Spatial Patterns of High Elevation Activity in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, USA

Illuminating High Elevation Seasonal Occupational Duration in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Using Patterning in Lithic Raw Materials and Tool Types

Abstract This paper offers a method for estimating relative occupational duration at high elevati... more Abstract This paper offers a method for estimating relative occupational duration at high elevations using lithic tool and raw material diversity. Presuming high elevation occupations are seasonal, we adapt methods traditionally used to estimate occupational duration for individual sites to the scale of landscapes, using data from the Beartooth and Absaroka Mountains of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Essentially, we work to understand how much of foragers’ seasonal rounds they were spending at high elevations. Averaged over the Holocene, the Beartooths appear to experience longer high elevation occupational duration than the Absarokas. In addition, Beartooths occupational durations are longest during the Early Archaic, likely related to the Early Holocene Warming. In the Absarokas, meanwhile, occupational durations are longest during the cooler, wetter Middle Archaic. Indeed, seasonal occupational durations consistently differ between the two ranges, suggesting diversity in mountain adaptations despite their similarities in resources and climate. Finally, the evidence suggests a gradual mid-to-late Holocene migration of Shoshonean peoples from the south and west rather than a sudden, unidirectional Numic Expansion.

Cross-cultural variation in child and adolescent time allocation to work and play in twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence societies

Understanding how socioecology affects contemporary children’s learning and work opportunities ca... more Understanding how socioecology affects contemporary children’s learning and work opportunities can help researchers better model the selection pressures which have shaped the evolution of human life history and social organization. Here, we compiled a global time allocation dataset for children and adolescents from hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence societies. We investigated how society-level variables including adult sexual division of labour, ecological risk, and climate related to variation in childcare, food production, domestic work, and play. We found that adult sexual division of labour predicted increased sex differences in time allocation, especially childcare. Children in safer ecologies allocated more time to childcare and domestic work, but ecological risk did not strongly predict participation in food production. Climate did not predict child and adolescent time allocation. We argue that by coordinating labour across age and sex, children may simultaneously learn to...