Weakly damped mechanical systems under small periodic forcing tend to exhibit periodic response in a close vicinity of certain periodic orbits of their conservative limit. Specifically, amplitude-frequency plots for the conservative limit have often been noted, both numerically and experimentally, to serve as backbone curves for the near resonance peaks of the forced response. In other cases, such a relationship between the unforced and forced response was not observed. Here, we provide a systematic mathematical analysis that predicts which members of conservative periodic orbit families will serve as backbone curves for the forced–damped response. We also obtain mathematical conditions under which approximate numerical and experimental approaches, such as energy balance and force appropriation, are justifiable. Finally, we derive analytic criteria for the birth of isolated response branches (isolas) whose identification is otherwise challenging from numerical continuation.