Аннотация:ABSTRACT People promote environmental change through behaviors such as habitat alteration and over-exploitation; they adapt to environmental changes for which they are not responsible; and they implement cultural changes that may be either causes or consequences of local environmental conditions. Thus, communities and populations could be impacted by interactions and feedbacks to stimuli and responses of both anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic origin. Given the complexity of these phenomena, many archaeologists and ecologists focus on one or two variables. Due to growing interest in the long-term historical record offered by archaeological data, it is timely to pose the question: "What are we measuring in the zooarchaeological record of fishing strategies?" Our answer is that we are measuring interrelated social and ecological patterns and processes influencing long-term social and ecological dynamics. We demonstrate the complexity of these measurements with a case study focusing on zooarchaeological data that show a trend for increasing diversity and decreasing mean trophic level in fishes between 2500 BC to AD 1565 in the Georgia Bight (USA). The conceptual framework we follow identifies gaps in our knowledge that limit our ability to distinguish between correlations and causal factors underlying this trend; but the framework itself enables us to clearly identify weaknesses that need to be resolved in order to explain the trends themselves.
