Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Sparks.

Optimal foraging models and faunal analysis to interpret diet require quantitative data to negate variables of results. With the collection and processing of eleven mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) in the Sierra Blanca Region, New Mexico, a statistically significant database for analysis is constructed. Previous researchers collected a wide range of data with different methods. By synthesizing it into a solid and replicable method an index can be developed for subsequent species to enable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Sheets.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Pueblo Southwest, ethnographies documenting Indigenous-animal interactions have been used to derive sets of expectations about how Ancestral Pueblo-animals relationships may have appeared in the past. This literature has primarily been used to predict the roles (e.g., subsistence, ritual) and depositional contexts (e.g., structure type) of animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reuven Yeshurun.

In zooarchaeology, Contextual Taphonomy means the integration of the stratigraphic and contextual data with zooarchaeological and taphonomic data, to clarify the 'life history' of a faunal sub-assemblage in a given context. The approach uses animal remains to explain variability among site features by looking into the differential taphonomic histories of the bones, most importantly in the post-discard stage. Archaeofaunal remains are normally ubiquitous in foragers’ camps and their histories are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Warner. Aleksa Alaica.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The influences of climate and human activity on archaeomalacological assemblages can be difficult to disentangle. We compare Early Horizon (EH; 800–200 BC) and Middle Horizon (MH; AD 600–1000) *Donax obesulus size, age estimates, and paleoclimate data. *D. obesulus is a short-lived (<5 years) intertidal clam common in archaeological and modern contexts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pam Crabtree.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intensive archaeological research was carried out in Ipswich between 1975 and 1990 in advance of urban redevelopment and new construction. The mammal and bird bones from 16 sites dating between 700 and 1150 were analyzed in order to identify patterns of urban provisioning and possible changes through time. The early medieval period was a period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Walsh.

This is an abstract from the "The Housepit 54 Project at Bridge River, British Columbia: Multidisciplinary Contributions to Household Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on previous research on the cultural transmission of material culture between generations at Housepit 54 (Prentiss et al. 2016; 2020a), this poster presents ongoing research exploring the possible transmission trajectories of lithic technologies across activity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Milne. Pamela Crabtree.

The faunal assemblages excavated from New York City’s Five Points neighborhood provided an opportunity to examine the foodways of the city’s 19th century working class.  One distinct Orange Street deposit was associated with a brothel which operated in the early 1840s and seemed to reflect the contradictory nature of this occupation.  While some food choices reflected the working class nature of the neighborhood, other finer foods, were selected for fancy feasts, to entertain guests or for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Breslawski. David Byers.

Although caves are often excellent for organic preservation, they also attract carnivores and introduce the potential for rock fall. Carnivores systematically remove spongy long bone ends from assemblages, while experimental studies have shown that rock fall can fragment dense long bone shafts. As a result, these processes may bias faunal assemblages in opposing directions. This has implications for the interpretation of correlations between bone density and skeletal element frequencies in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Huiras.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People are what they eat, and in more ways than one. What someone eats can be an indicator of their identity, class, and social status. This cultural aspect to food means that archaeologists can use food remains to better understand the social organization of past societies. Here I consider faunal remains to investigate the possibility of social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane E. Wallman. Kevin Fogle.

This paper examines the results of zooarchaeological analysis completed on faunal remains from Witherspoon Island, a 19th century cotton plantation in South Carolina. This research contributes to a larger ongoing historical archaeological project exploring the lives of enslaved African-Americans and their descendants on the remote absentee plantation. To examine shifting food practices at the site, we present the results of the analysis of faunal remains recovered from two house and adjacent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Lau.

Cooperation occurs at all scales of social life: among individuals, among households, and among groups that supersede the household level. In some cases, such cooperation precipitates the formation of complex social structures and institutions and perpetuates their endurance. The variability of forms such cooperation can take at all scales of social complexity is broad, but an increasing degree of scalar cooperation correlates with increasing social complexity. This study uses zooarchaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Cramb. Victor Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polynesian atolls are often viewed as outlying provinces or "outer Islands" as compared to larger high islands. These often remote and diminutive coral islands are, and were, home to relatively small populations. Many coral island groups trace ancestry to, and had sustained contact with, high islands. These past connections and modern sociopolitical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nawa Sugiyama.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Applying a relational ontological approach to faunal bones I identify animals, secondary animal by-products, and faunal artifacts as persons—in the corporal animal forms of puma, eagle, wolf, and rattlesnake—whom actively engaged with entangled sociopolitical communities of humans....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Goldfield. Ross Booton. Teresa Steele.

"Specialization" and "generalization" are used as descriptors for Paleolithic subsistence behavior, particularly when differentiating the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. These terms, however, dichotomize and obscure the complexity of subsistence decision-making. Instead, it is more productive to investigate whether Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (AMH) differed in their perception of thresholds of cost versus gain in processing food. These thresholds are points beyond which the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Whitaker.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is widely acknowledged that fire was used throughout the western United States as a landscape management tool. Direct archaeological evidence is rare and successful studies that identify Native American burning rely on multidisciplinary approaches. One such study in California by Lightfoot,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tyler Faith. Andrew Du.

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists routinely measure the taxonomic richness of faunal assemblages in order to explore questions related to human subsistence behavior or paleoenvironmental change. A common solution to the well-known sampling issues that attend such analysis is rarefaction, whereby sample size is standardized by rarefying larger assemblages...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Friesen. Andrew Stewart.

Complex relationships between people and animals define life in the northern past. For Inuit these relationships are manifested in many ways; particularly in practices that are often described as "showing respect" for animals, thus promoting stable relations between animal and human societies. Frustratingly, many of these activities, which are so prominent in the ethnographic record, have few archaeological correlates. Here, we examine one important practice with a relatively high level of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Everhart.

Calcium carbonate encrustations of faunal materials are a problem that limits analysis of faunal materials from a wide variety of regions and time periods. In many locations they are associated with climates with persistent or increased precipitation. This precipitation percolates through the sediments of the stratigraphic column, mixing with calcium carbonate. This mixture is then gradually deposited throughout the stratigraphic column, encasing archaeological materials in hardened carbonate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianne Boileau.

Archaeological excavations at the Maya site of Lamanai, Belize, have resulted in the recovery of more than 10,000 remains of turtles dating from the Late Postclassic to the Early Colonial periods. This abundance of turtle specimens represents a unique opportunity to study Maya turtle exploitation at an unprecedented scale. Preliminary analyses of a sample of 2,400 bones recovered from domestic structures provide information on subsistence practices. The Maya primarily exploited river turtles,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Sharpe.

With an occupational history spanning nearly two millennia, the Maya site of Ceibal provides a rare opportunity to study the remains of ritual practices and domestic activities at household groups over a long scale of time. This study examines the zooarchaeological remains, both bones and shells, recovered from household caches, burials, and middens from several peripheral locations around the Ceibal site epicenter. The diversity of household types and extended time frame provides an opportunity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Pacheco. Shelby M. Patrick.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human-animal relations are inherently dynamic in nature and, in recent years, archaeologists have started to explore alternative approaches to shed light on anomalous patterns that deviate from traditional models of understanding. Archaeologists traditionally assumed that they could account for cultural differences globally by employing western divisions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Chouinard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological research often relies heavily on quantitative data analyses and positivist interpretations that are statistically significant. Typically we study human and animal interactions by characterizing animal processing, butchery, and consumption, including cut mark location on the bone, shape, size, quantity, and directionality. Here in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luc Doyon.

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. The Aurignacian is a pivotal technocomplex in European prehistory marked by the development of novel socio-economic strategies, and symbolic and cultural systems at a continental scale. In recent decades, efforts were made to outline the contour of the cultural provinces occupied by the human groups comprised within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolette Edwards.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The pre- and post-depositional processes that impacted the faunal assemblage associated with the Ipiutak component at the Croxton site, Alaska, have not been adequately studied/documented (see Gerlach 1989). This study focuses not only on the pre- and post-depositional disturbances that may have occurred, but also on how the burial environment may have played...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fabiana María Martin. Francisco Juan Prevosti. Luis Alberto Borrero.

Cueva Nordensjkold is a cave located in the Cerro Benitez, at Ultima Esperanza, Chile, above 150 masl, and accordingly beyond the highest stand of the Late Glacial Consuelo paleolake. The study of its Late Pleistocene faunal remains -Mylodontinae, Hippidion saldiasi, Camelidae, Panthera onca mesembrina and a large undetermined carnivore- is crucial for the understanding of the process of biological colonization of the Cerro Benitez area, where ephemeral Late Pleistocene human occupations were...