Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
1,251-1,275 (1,356 Records)
While much work at James Madison’s Montpelier looks at the differences in faunal remains between sites, the amount of intra-site analysis is lacking. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between previously analyzed faunal remains and their physical locations within the South Yard. The majority of domestic tasks at Montpelier centered around the South Yard, which included three dwellings for domestic slaves, two smokehouses for cured meats, and a kitchen where Nelly Madison had her meals...
When Charismatic Megafauna Meet: The Relationship between Archaeologists and Proboscideans in North America (2015)
Archaeologists have a unique relationship with the faunal record of proboscideans. The interpretative histories associated with mammoths and mastodons, particularly in North America, are wholly unlike those of other zooarchaeological species both extinct and extant. Distinctively divisive, consequential, and enduring, the interpretive attention and rhetoric focused on proboscideans has proceeded largely independent of the known inventory of sites and assemblages in Pleistocene North America....
Where Did the Fish Go? Use of Archaeological Salmonid Remains to Guide Recovery Efforts in the American West (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Given the scale of habitat loss from development associated with the Industrial Age, archaeological faunas pre-dating the modern era often represent animal populations extirpated from their former ranges. For example, anadromous salmonid populations in the Pacific Northwest of North America have become extirpated from much of their range in the past...
Where The Wild Things Aren't: Expanding Domestication Definitions in Indigenous Worlds as a Case Study from Picuris Pueblo, NM (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Domestication has been traditionally rigidly defined, excluding a larger spectrum of species managed by Indigenous groups throughout the world. For example, the management of Caribou by the Sámi, or keeping of Cuy (guinea pigs) by Indigenous Peruvians. In this paper I expand this spectrum of animal domestication to include species...
"Where’s the Beef?" and Other Meat-Related Questions: Pre- and Post-Emancipation Foodways on James Island, South Carolina (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological evidence, historical documentation, and oral histories are used to compare the diet of individuals enslaved on Stono Plantation with those of the tenant-era population of James Island. Pre-emancipation data indicate a high level of livestock consumption supplemented primarily by fishing, but also by some degree of trapping and/or hunting....
Which Stories for Which Storytelling? A Community-Based Approach to the Nineteenth- to Twentieth-Century Nunatsiavummiut Material Heritage (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research and Challenges in Arctic and Subarctic Cultural Heritage Studies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation discusses archaeological research that is intended to create a space for the inhabitants to reconnect with their material heritage on the land. The project took place in the Nain region (Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada) in 2021 and 2022. It contributed to the Nunatsiavut Government policies...
Whose Bone is this? An Investigation into Modern Histological Methods of Species Identification with Application to Archaeological Faunal Assemblages in the Pacific (2015)
Bone fragmentation is a potential issue for anyone who works with skeletal remains. If a bone is burned, or fragmented in a way that prevents morphological identification, it can be near impossible to identify which bone it is, or what taxa it belongs to. However, there are techniques for identifying bones based on their microstructure, as the microstructure of human and non-human bone has distinct differences. These differences allow for microscopic comparisons of bone cross-sections and the...
Whose Donkey? Domestication and Variability (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Morphological, genetic, ethnographic and behavioral research on domestication has provided a basis for understanding variability in the process of donkey domestication. It is clear that the lack of herd-based sociality among wild relatives of the donkey and people’s reliance on donkeys for transport create distinctive...
The WHY and HOW of integrating archaeological findings into wildlife management efforts (2015)
The relevancy of archaeology to contemporary social issues has become a topic of concern for many in the discipline. Zooarchaeologists in particular have focused some effort in highlighting how archeological interpretations can assist with wildlife management and conservation biology. While this work helps to amplify the social value of archaeology, the approach to date has been somewhat disparate. In order to implement the vision of integrating archaeological findings to wildlife management and...
Why Choose Small Packages When There Are So Many Big Packages Around? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The trajectory of diet change in Northeast Asia, is distinct from that in the Near East, whose archaeological record has shaped our most enduring models for changes in human diet. Traditional optimality models, as applied to the archaeological record, predict that small game will only...
Why Pursue Fish in Small Quantities? The Case of Ancestral Puebloan Fishing in the PIV Middle Rio Grande (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In prehispanic central New Mexico, small numbers of disarticulated fish remains—such as catfish, sucker, and gar—are frequently recovered from Pueblo IV (AD 1350–1600) sites in the Middle Rio Grande basin, but they are rare during earlier agricultural time periods. Increased aquatic habitat...
Why Screen-Size Matters for Isotopic Analysis of Archaeological Faunal Remains: A Case Study from Norton Sound, Alaska (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Saffron cod (Eleginus gracilis) are small nearshore fish distributed throughout the Pacific and Arctic oceans and were a staple to preindustrial Indigenous fisheries of Western Alaska. Fish, mammal, and bird-bone were sampled for carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes from sites in Norton Sound, Alaska, spanning 2500 BCE–1850 CE. Comparing our...
Wild animal use and landscape interpretations at Pimeria Alta Spanish colonial sites (2016)
European livestock accompanied the foundation of Spanish missions and presidios in the arid Pimeria Alta, altering the local landscape and native society. Livestock connected desert farmers to distant colonial markets and providing a new source of protein and grease, but also required new economic, social, and spatial arrangements, potentially affecting the availability of wild animals in native communities near Spanish colonial sites . This paper surveys wild animal presence and diversity at...
Wild Animals in Cities: A View from South Asia’s Early Historic Period Using a Zooarchaeological and Textual Approach (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urban settings are often imagined as fully domesticated landscapes, but in fact cities are complex ecosystems where many kinds of animals, including non-domesticates, play important roles. Textual evidence from the Early Historic period of South Asia gives us a...
Wild Meets Domestic at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey (2017)
One of the classic ways the nature/culture dichotomy manifests itself in human interactions with the environment is through the categories of wild and domestic. Some have argued that this distinction is not helpful, and certainly the boundaries are complicated, but it seems most useful to start by asking whether it was meaningful to particular people in the past. Here I will explore whether wild and domestic were relevant concepts to the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük (Central Anatolia), and to some...
A Winter at Akulivik: Faunal Analysis of a Thulean House at the site of Kangiakallak-1 (Nunavik, Québec) (2015)
The site of Kangiakallak-1 (JeGn-2 – AKU-10-018), located near Akulivik (Nunavik, Québec), has yielded several occupations attributed to the Dorset and Thule periods. Level A corresponds to a Thulean winter house for which collapse and preservation in permafrost provides an excellent and undisturbed record of Thulean lifeway. This paper presents the results of a faunal analysis conducted on animal remains found within the Level A house. The dominant species recovered were caribou Rangifer...
Winter Garden Hunting along the Rio Grande Flyway: A Case Study in the Procurement of Migratory Birds by Puebloans along the Rio Grande (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Garden hunting is a topic that has received substantial attention in archaeofaunal research over the past 30 years. However, these studies have tended to focus on hunting in active gardens during the growing season, or in fallow fields. Consequently, these past studies have often focused on the...
The Wolf Under the Plaza: Pastoralism and Predation in Spanish New Mexico (2018)
The nomadic tribes of the Plains—notably, the Comanche and Apache—are typically considered the main obstacles to the northern expansion of the Spanish empire in North America. But early Spanish settlers in New Mexico found themselves up against another formidable foe that has received far less attention in the literature: the wolf. Indeed, for an expanding pastoral society, the wolf posed perhaps the biggest threat to local economic welfare. In this paper, we report on the recent discovery of a...
Woodland Subsistence in Upper East Tennessee (2018)
This paper describes the species diversity and taphonomic modifications of Woodland Period fauna from Upper East Tennessee. Fauna from both rock shelter and open-air locales from the Early Woodland (ca. 3000 years B.P.) to the Late Woodland (ca. 1000 years B.P.) period are used to characterize subsistence practices and site use in the region. In this paper, we present the MNI, NISP and measures of diversity, richness, and evenness of different animal species identified in the faunal assemblages...
The Work of Feline Bones and Feline Imagery at Early Horizon Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large felines play crucial roles in origin narratives, cosmologies, and political authority in Mesoamerican societies, yet actual faunal remains and feline imagery are uncommon for the Early Horizon, from 1400 to 1000 cal BCE, especially in the highlands. Feline imagery appears in the stone sculptural corpus of the Gulf Olmec...
"The World is a Garden": Human-Animal Relations and Sustainability Comparative Studies of Classic Maya and Early China (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interactions among organisms along with environmental factors in non-Western cultures, require to be re-examined since Western humanity-nature binary explanations fail to take into account indigenous ontologies. In the title, I prioritize environment among these three objects because I want to demonstrate that it is a prerequisite, helping shape the...
Writing, Sewing, Eating: Faunal Analysis of a post-Emancipation School for Girls in Montserrat, West Indies (2018)
Potato Hill is located on the western side of Montserrat, which is a small volcanic island in the West Indies. Initial surveys conducted at this site during the 2010-2014 field seasons identified three historic structures. They were subsequently excavated in 2015-2016, and ranged from the 17th century through the 19th century. Of these, the 19th-century structure Feature 16 became of particular interest due to the artifacts related to writing (slate, pencils), sewing (thimbles, buttons, and...
The “X”-Ray Files: Preliminary Results on the Identification of Shark Species Using X-Ray Technology and Its Implications for a Better Understanding of the Economic and Symbolic Role Played by Sharks in Prehispanic Andean Societies (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shark fisheries were an important economic activity carried out by small-scale maritime communities in the prehispanic Andean coast since at least the second millennium BC. New evidence found in Huanchaco, north coast of Peru, suggests that during the fifth and seventh centuries of our era, sharks became an essential source of proteins in the daily diet and...
Yikes, no comparative collection! Can 3D imaging produce robust faunal identifications? (2017)
Most zooarchaeologists are familiar with the uncertain feeling when faced with identifying material in the absence of a physical comparative collection. In response to this challenge, numerous photographic atlases have been produced to provide researchers with access to collections while in the field. Unfortunately, 2D images are constrained by their inability to be ‘handled’ and measured in the same way as a physical specimen. The UNE Archaeology virtual bone project was initially developed as...
Your Horse Is a Donkey! Identifying Domesticated Equids Using ZooMS (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Horses (Equus caballus) and donkeys (Equus asinus) play essential roles in human culture and economy. Unlike most other domesticates, horses and donkeys can produce hybrids. Mules, offspring of female horses and male donkeys, have been found in archaeological contexts across the Old World. Written sources describe the choice of horse, donkey, or mule as...