Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
126-150 (1,581 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Variability within the Aurignacian: New Research Outlooks" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across Eurasia, abrupt climate shifts during the Late Pleistocene impacted human and natural systems. For the Iberian Peninsula, our knowledge of human adaptive responses during the Upper Paleolithic has improved in recent years with the development of new radiocarbon techniques and high-resolution paleoclimatic records....
Avian Evidence as a Proxy for Investigating Behavioral and Environmental Change at the Harris Site (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Harris Site (LA 1867) is a Late Pithouse-period (A.D. 550-1000) agricultural village located along the upper Mimbres River Valley in New Mexico. Faunal remains recovered from the Harris site indicate that inhabitants continued to depend on a wide variety of wild resources even as they transitioned into a more sedentary agricultural subsistence...
Avian Skeletal Part Representation at 49-KIS-050 (2016)
Zooarchaeological avifauna analyses demonstrate that wing elements tend to be overrepresented in archaeological assemblages from diverse temporal and cultural contexts. There have been several explanations for this phenomenon including bone density, differential transport and more recently, Bovy’s social zooarchaeological interpretations for the overall overabundance of wing elements, as well as specifically of distal wing elements in the Watmough Bay assemblage. The avifaunal assemblage...
Avifauna of the Bonneville Basin: Past Variation and Future Conservation (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating 20 Years of Support: Current Work by Recipients of the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship for Zooarchaeologists" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The final regression of Lake Bonneville during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition resulted in dramatic environmental changes in the Bonneville basin, followed by further environmental fluctuations throughout the Holocene. Recent research of faunal and floral...
Avifaunal Remains from the Palmrose Site (35CT47): Establishing Seasonality and Investigating Endangered Species (2018)
Avifaunal remains have great potential to improve archaeological understanding of the economy and subsistence of peoples who lived in the past, as well as to yield information about local ecology, environmental change, and past bird species distribution. The large assemblage of faunal remains from the three archaeological sites comprising the Seaside Collection from Seaside, OR, contains significant quantities of bird bone. Previous analyses of vertebrate remains (including birds) by Greenspan...
Awl Mighty Tools: Comparing Experimentally Created Animal Bone Tools to Archaeological Examples (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experimental archaeology supports our understanding of past lifeways and how artifactual materials were created. In zooarchaeology, its use in interpreting how previous populations may have crafted animal bone tools is imperative to identifying preforms and other stages of the manufacture process. The Northern Arizona University Faunal...
Background to New Methods in Zooarchaeology: Identifying, Storing, and Recording Faunal Collections that will be Used by other Researchers (2016)
In the past 15 years, we have seen significant methodological developments in zooarchaeology, including the uses of isotopic studies, aDNA, and geometric morphometrics. However, all of these methods depend on careful identification of animal bone materials and the preservation of their archaeological and stratigraphic context. This paper discusses basic methods of identifying, recording, archiving, and storing zooarchaeological collections in ways that will make them amenable to research by...
Balance on South Diamond: Using Faunal Analysis to Understand Biodiversity and Resource Use Trends in the Northern Mimbres Region (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gila National Forest/Wilderness comprised of rich mountainous land spanning between western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. This land was once home to the people of the Mimbres culture. The environments within these natural areas vary due to different altitudes and precipitation, which also affect the variety and amount of ecological resources. Two sites...
Barn Owl (Tyto alba) Pellets as Environmental Proxies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Non-cultural deposits and animal accumulations have been important for reconstructing past environmental conditions. In western North America, packrat middens have been analyzed to infer past vegetation communities, precipitation rates, and other environmental variables. In this poster, we analyze owl-generated pellets deposited over a 1,500-year period at...
Bayesian Multilevel Models of Diachronic Dietary Trajectories (DDTs) from 13,000 years of Great Plains Faunal Exploitation (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists rely on long-term records of faunal remains to study significant diachronic changes in human-environmental interactions, including foraging-farming transitions, human-driven extinctions, animal translocations, and the development of complex societies. Here, we define the magnitude and direction of change observed in the...
A Bayesian Solution to the Controversy over the Identification of Bone Surface Modification in Paleoanthropology (2017)
Bone surface modification (BSM) remains a primary source of taphonomic inference in paleontological and archaeological contexts. However long-standing debates in BSM studies have undermined the utility of this approach. We use an objective machine-based learning algorithm rooted in Bayesian probability theory designed to quantify the level of uncertainty associated with a formal assignment of agent to individual BSM. Our multivariate Bayesian model, trained on large assemblages of...
Bear/Human Relationships in Southeastern Native North America: Creating Archaeological Models from Historical Accounts (2017)
Historical accounts and ethnographic studies of the Indians of greater southeastern North America dating from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries contain abundant information on native people’s attitudes toward black bears (Ursus americanus). These records provide a basis for inferences about changes in subsistence exploitation of bear populations in the Southeast over the last five centuries, while offering clues about longer-term non-subsistence relationships between bears and humans that...
Bears and people: from the wilderness to dancing (2017)
There has been a very strong relationship between human societies and the brown bear (Ursus arctos) in many different places and cultures. The bear has had multiple roles in European societies, from the ancient (and modern) epitome of the wild, through religious symbol to the arenas of the Roman Empire, and their later use as entertainment. At what point does the bear’s position change in society from an animal to be feared, to one to be mocked? In terms of captive management, a fully grown bear...
Beasts and Feasts in Late Medieval Ireland: The Case from Mcdermot’s Rock (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland triggered a complex swirl of changes that presage dynamics of European colonialism in modern times. One key pattern is the emergence of divides between Anglo-Norman (colonizer) and Gaelic (indigenous) identities. Negotiating differences between “being Anglo-Norman”...
The Beaver of Children and the Poor: The Social Dimension of Fur-Bearing Mammal Exploitation in Central British Columbia (2017)
The intensive Historic Period exploitation of beaver and other fur-bearing mammals, especially those that are small bodied, has typically been seen as a fur trade phenomena that can be explained in terms of optimizing returns of both material capital and prestige represented by European goods through the use of more efficient technologies introduced by Europeans. If this were strictly the case, we might expect to find a greater representation of the remains of beaver and small fur-bearers in...
Becoming Urban – Emerging Urban Food Culture in Early Modern Tornio, Northern Finland (2013)
This paper focuses on emerging urban food culture in Tornio, a small town in Northern Finland, between AD 1621 and 1800. Tornio was founded in 1621 in Northern Finland, which at that time was a part of the Swedish kingdom. The population of the new urban centre was a mixture of local peasants and merchants from other towns of Sweden. Tornio was a dynamic boom town where people of different origins came together, forming a new urban community and a new urban food culture. Zooarchaeological...
Behavioral Ecology and the Emergence of Sedentism and Agriculture (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than a decade after Niche Construction Theory was proposed as an alternative to behavioral ecological models in the study of agricultural origins, many misconceptions about behavioral ecology and its contribution to the study of the emergence of sedentism and agriculture remain. Here, I address some of these misconceptions and consider some new...
Between domestic trash and intentional deposits at La Banda, Chavin de Huantar, Peru. (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Scaling New Heights: Recent Advances in Andean Zooarchaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I will present some of the zooarchaeological material recovered in the last two seasons of excavations at La Banda sector in Chavin de Huantar. La Banda appears to have different areas, including a workshop, multi-purpose rooms, and a recently discovered large-stone long platform. Bone tools, decorated bone...
Between Fishing and Rites of Passage at Death: Recent Developments from Excavations at Jicarita Island, Coiba, Panama (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recent focus on insular areas has expanded our knowledge on the abundance and diversity of insular, coastal, and pelagic habitats harvested from ca. 6200 BP. Inspired by Richard Cooke’s vision to explore the Coiba Archipelago, in 2023 the authors...
Between Identification and Tradition: Toward a Folk Biology of Pre-Hispanic Andean Pastoralism (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Scaling New Heights: Recent Advances in Andean Zooarchaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Faunal analysis in the Andes, while not without its own unique challenges, forms the foundation on which much of our understanding of Andean economy and ecology is based. Once thought to be a practice limited to the high Andes, it is now largely accepted that camelid pastoralism became a prominent practice at low altitudes...
Between Party Lines: A Bipartisan Reevaluation of the Early Paleoindian Zooarchaeological Record (2015)
The debate regarding early Paleoindians as megafaunal specialists or subsistence generalists has had a long and contentious history in Americanist archaeology. A quantitative reanalysis of the early Paleoindian zooarchaeological record in the continental United States is presented. Previous analyses of the faunal record focused only on taxonomic richness and have not utilized other measurements of taxonomic diversity. My analyses of the faunal record include measurements of taxonomic richness,...
Beyond (and including) academia in zooarchaeological research in Britain: the ‘Rewilding’ later prehistory project (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Academia: Zooarchaeological Case Studies from CRM and Other Nonacademic Spaces" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ‘Rewilding’ later prehistory project has set a developer-funded fieldwork organisation – Oxford Archaeology – and the wider developer-funded industry centre stage of exciting cross-sector multidisciplinary research with environmental archaeology colleagues from academia, Historic England, and...
Beyond bones: Non-faunal evidence for the role of dogs in Anglo-Saxon society (2015)
Zooarchaeological data have provided much new information on Anglo-Saxon dogs including information on animal sizes, ages at death, paleopathology, and evidence for the treatment/mistreatment of dogs. However, many aspects of the relationship between humans and dogs in the Anglo-Saxon period cannot be understood on the basis of animal bones alone. This paper will explore the non-archaeozoological evidence for human-dog relationships in the Anglo-Saxon period drawing on evidence from literature...
Beyond Caves: Exploring the Diversity and Adaptation of Early Human Settlement Patterns in East-Central Europe (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Variability within the Aurignacian: New Research Outlooks" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While caves have traditionally been seen as prime habitats for early hominins, the prevalence of open-air Aurignacian sites in East-Central Europe has long invited a broader investigation into the spatial preferences and adaptive strategies of early humans in the region. One such early adaptation that has been suggested are...
Beyond Consumption: Evidence for Animal Bone Use in Music, Art, and Ritual in Texas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal bone was utilized for more than subsistence purposes. Most non-subsistence use has been focused on utilitarian tools. Bone-use beyond subsistence and utilitarian tool use is rarely identified or considered for its cultural impact or implications. Often it is difficult to identify in the archaeological record, and is frequently overlooked, with its...