Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
151-175 (1,581 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the challenges in zooarchaeological research is to advance new methods of understanding animal husbandry within the past socio-ecological context. Intensification of wool production is typically evidenced in the archaeological record by the increase of sheep remains in species abundance and adult mortality; however,...
Beyond the Butcher’s Block: Culinary Choices and Meat Utility in a Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia Residence (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late 19th-century Philadelphia was a landscape of urbanization and industrial growth. Feature 89, a large pit in the rear of a dwelling in central Philadelphia, offers a glimpse into the city’s complex foodways during this transformative time. Faunal remains recovered from Feature 89 represented the discards of pig, cattle, chicken, turkey, sheep, and...
Beyond the Farm: Forensic Taphonomy in East Tennessee (2018)
The impact of Walter Klippel’s teaching has provided his students the tools necessary to answer several critical questions faced by forensic anthropologists. Through his classroom tutelage countless numbers of graduates have the skills to recognize and categorize non-human bones. Beyond this zooarchaeological training, his research influence and guidance has also afforded both students and practitioners alike with knowledge to identify and document particular signatures of postmortem damage...
Beyond the Mission Walls: Faunal analysis of an Alta California mission ranchería feature (2015)
Mission Santa Clara de Asís, located in south San Francisco Bay, was one in a chain of Spanish Franciscan missions stretching from the south to the north of Alta California. Founded in 1777, Mission Santa Clara has been the subject of archaeological investigation for decades, but only in the past few years has the lens of research focused on native people’s experiences and navigation of the mission system.This paper presents the results of a zooarchaeological analysis of a sampled pit feature...
Bickering over Bison Bones: Radiocarbon and Stable Isotope Analysis to Determine Number of Individuals at the Haynie Site (5MT1905) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Haynie site (5MT1905) is an ancestral Pueblo village that was intermittently occupied from approximately AD 700 to 1280. The formation of this village is extremely complex, as it includes multiple occupations and significant modern disturbance. The Crow Canyon Archaeological Center has conducted research at Haynie since 2017, focusing on reconstructing...
Big Meat Feasting in the Pisgah Phase of Western North Carolina. (2017)
Animal remains from three late prehistoric Pisgah phase sites in mountainous western North Carolina are described and compared. The sites include a mound (Garden Creek Mound No.1) and adjacent village, and a village with no mound (the Cane River Middle School site). Deer, black bear, turkey, and box turtle remains dominate all three assemblages. Three large bones from the mound, previously reported as bones of Bison, are definitively Elk. Whole large mammal bones, recovered almost exclusively...
Big reasons to eat small fishes: Nutritional composition and subsistence decisions along California’s Central Coast (2015)
While behavioral ecology approaches to human subsistence in archaeology often focus on calories, nutritional content is another aspect that can influence a resource’s desirability. In particular, fats are an important dietary source of easily digestible calories for hunter-gatherers. Proximate composition (fat, protein, moisture, and ash) is presented here for several fish species commonly found in archaeological sites along the central California coast, and combined with data drawn from the...
The bigger the cow the better she is’: new archaeological perspectives on livestock ‘improvement’ in late medieval and early modern England (2013)
In recent years, zooarchaeologists have become increasingly interested in exploring the timing and nature of ‘improvements’ in animal husbandry in later medieval and early modern England. These studies have identified that size and shape changes occurred from the 14th to the 17th centuries. However, the picture is complex: outlying sites experience later developments than central localities and there is considerable variation in the timing of size changes for different species at different...
The Biggest Party of All? Zooarchaeological Analysis of an Oversized Late Inca Banquet at Pachacamac (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pachacamac is a major archaeological site on the central coast of Peru, occupied from the 5th to the 16th centuries, AD. This paper reports the results of an interdisciplinary study of a late Inca context discovered in building B4, excavated in 2016 and 2018 by the Ychsma Project (ULB). A series of analyses were conducted, including zooarchaeological ones,...
Bighorn Sheep Bone Caches in the Lava Tube Caves of El Malpais National Monument, New Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rugged volcanic landscapes of El Malpais National Monument contain over 400 lava tube caves, some of which harbor the most southerly perennial ice in North America. Many of the caves also house the material record of precontact human use in the form of internal architecture, ceramic, and other artifacts. Caches of...
Bighorn Sheep Processing in the White Mountains, California (2015)
Previous research in the eastern Great Basin using stable isotope analysis of faunal remains suggests that bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) responded to climate change by shifting their ranges to higher elevations during warm intervals. A shift in sheep ranges would have increased travel and transportation costs for central place foragers based in lower elevation valleys. We expect that hunters responded to the increased costs in a number of ways, including altering settlement strategies and...
Bio-cultural exchange and human health - past and present (2016)
There is growing concern about the impact of biological exchange on human health, the WHO correlating shifts in biodiversity with the decline of medicinal biota and the emergence and spread of infectious diseases. Paradoxically, human desire to improve health and well-being has been the very motivation behind the worldwide translocation of many species. This is, in part, because ethnomedicine tends to target preferentially species that are exotic, the belief being that geographical distance is...
The Biological Baseline in Zooarchaeology: Unpacking the Domestication of South American Camelids (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The domestication of llamas and alpacas in South America resulted in compelling similarities to sheep and goat pastoralism in Western Asia, but the underlying biology of the wild ancestors of camelids provided distinct challenges to human control and selection. The pastoral economies of South America...
Biological exchange in the Swahili world: archaeofaunal and biomolecular evidence (2016)
The Swahili coast, stretching from Somalia to Mozambique, has a long history of engagement in western Indian Ocean trade, from at least the first century CE according to documentary evidence. One result is the widespread use of animals of Asian origin – particularly zebu cattle (Bos indicus) and chicken (Gallus gallus) – in African subsistence systems today. However, tracing these animals’ arrival and spread is complicated by their osteological similarities to indigenous taxa and by poor...
A Biometric Meta-study on the Origins and Spread of Caprine Management in the Northern and Southern Levant (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently, explanatory models for plant and animal domestication have shifted from single-origin explanations to multiregional frameworks. Despite this, the timing and origins of caprine management across the Fertile Crescent remain the subject of debate, particularly for the southern Levantine region. Here, we compile an extensive database of published...
Biomolecular and zooarchaeological insights into human-turtle interactions in historical New Orleans, Louisiana (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Biomolecular Approaches to Human-Animal Interactions Past and Present" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Turtle soup is a dish synonymous with New Orleans’ cuisine, and its deep history is enshrined in historical cookbooks, newspapers, and restaurant menus. However, despite its cultural and historical importance in New Orleans and other areas of the United States, turtle soup, and the...
Bird Behavior and Biology: A Consideration of the Agentive Role of Birds in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (2018)
As one of the only classes in the animal kingdom capable of flight, birds are privy to a realm of movement that humans can only partially control. Birds possess specific traits and engage in a variety of behaviors that directly affect the mechanics of capture and use, such as gregariousness and flock size, preferences in nesting and feeding locations, wing strength and readiness to flush, and aggressiveness and territoriality. Human-bird relationships also move beyond the semantics of capture to...
Birds in Ritual Practice and Ceremonial Organization in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Birds have remained one of the most symbolically valued animals in human cultures, from prehistoric past to ethnographic present, and across the globe. Especially in the North American Southwest, whole birds and their parts have been an integral part of Pueblo ceremonial life for centuries. Their ritual and symbolic value has been demonstrated both...
Birds of a Feather: Suggestions for Best Practices in Taxonomic Identification (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Avian bones from archaeological sites have traditionally been overlooked in zooarchaeological analyses in favor of domesticates or larger animals. While an increased number of archaeological avian bone analyses have been conducted in the past 20 years, taxonomic identification methods often vary between researchers. Identification methods can skew...
Birds of a Feather? Bird Conservation and Archaeology in the Gulf of Alaska (2017)
Gulf of Alaska islands provide habitat for substantial populations of both seabirds and migratory waterfowl, which have been under threat from mammal introductions and landscape degradation for more than 200 years. Bird management drives decisions in this island region and focuses on the eradication of invasive species and restoration of island landscapes to their "natural" state. However, given that people and climate have influenced these landscapes for thousands of years, we ask: how do we...
Black Bear Use through Time in the Southern Appalachians (2017)
Historic accounts of Fort San Juan, a Spanish garrison built near the native village of Joara in the late 1560s in western North Carolina, inform us that chiefs from neighboring towns brought "meat and maize" to the soldiers on various occasions. Based on the high proportion of bear in the fort faunal assemblage, it seems likely that the foods gifted to the Spaniards included bear meat. A recent zooarchaeological study suggests that native peoples provisioned the soldiers with some prime bear...
Bluefish Caves I, II, III: Taphonomic Analysis of the Mammal and Bird Bone Assemblages (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following its discovery and excavation in the 1970-1980’s, the Bluefish Caves site (northern Yukon Territory, Canada) yielded a small number of stone artifacts and thousands of vertebrate remains buried in late Pleistocene loess. Preliminary taphonomic observations suggested that modern humans visited the caves about 30,000 years ago, raising considerable...
Bodies Shaping Bodies: Using Butchery to Trace Human-Animal Relationships (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While our relationship encompasses far more than just the dinner menu, food is one of the key ways in which human and animals lives and bodies directly shape one another. Indeed, beyond just the act of eating, how human and animal bodies meet in the context of procurement and processing can...
Body Mass Estimates of Dogs in North America by Geography, Time, and Human Cultural Associations (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dogs of North America share a long history of interaction with humans, yet little is known about how humans managed their dogs prior to modern breeding practices that became popular during the sixteenth century. European colonists recognized a few indigenous dog “breeds” and described these dogs as primarily “wolf-like” in appearance and phenotypically...
Bone and Antler Organic Pressure Flakers (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone has been used as a raw material for a range of activities for at least two million years. The criteria for determining whether a bone was used—or shaped and then used—have been established by archaeologists following decades of experimental research. In contrast, the antiquity of using bone for pressure flaking stone is less well...