| Abstract
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I examine the hypothesis that environmental changes associated with the last deglaciation led to the adoption of more diverse and intensive subsistence strategies by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers in southeastern Europe. The rapid climatic warming of the Bolling/Allerod interstadial, beginning about 12,500 C years B.P., accelerated the late-glacial rise in sea levels and generated increased greater climatic instability. I predict that these changes caused widespread and synchronous faunal depletion and compression of human populations in the eastern Adriatic area, thereby selecting for more diverse and intense procurement strategies. I analyze the faunal data from three Late-Glacial archaeological sites, Badanj, Kopacina, and Sandalja (Republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) to test this prediction. Evolutionary ecology and anthropology provide the methods used for modeling subsistence strategies and their order of use in response to dietary stress. In these models, change in diet breadth is the first response to changes in resource densities and distributions brought on by environmental change. After the onset of the Bolling/Allerlod interstadial, diet breadth increases at Badanj, while it decreases at Kopacina and Sandalja. A second-order response to changes in resource availability is change in the intensity of resource processing. Analyses of prey sex ratios, mortality, carcass transport, and grease rendering, give internally consistent results for each site. These results complement changes in diet breadth and are not attributable to non-human agents. Furthermore, changes in carcass processing and diet breadth occur in the order predicted. I conclude that climatic changes per se, do not account for the temporal and geographic patterns of change in the eastern Adriatic during the Late Glacial; no single factor or process appears to account patterning in the data. While the contrastive trends in diet breadth and carcass processing between the Adriatic Plain and its hinterland suggest a compression of band territories from the Pleistocene coastline inland, perhaps in response to rising sea levels, other processes were also at work.
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