J Archaeol Sci 31 (3)

Although measures of evenness of archaeological faunas are increasingly used in zooarchaeological analyses, the widely accepted hypothesis that increasing evenness should indicate increasing dietary breadth has not been tested. In this paper, the author examines three factors that can contribute to changing evenness values. The "evenness hypothesis" is then tested using ethnographic data from northern Canada. Although the results support the hypothesis, they also show that the nature of archaeological data may make evenness measures difficult to use accurately.