Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
301-325 (1,356 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the relationship between garden hunting and food security in the Central Illinois River Valley, an area plagued by endemic warfare and drought during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Located ~100 km north of Cahokia, the largest precolumbian polity in North America, the CIRV was composed of smaller settlements that...
Deerskins and Domesticates: Creek Subsistence and Economic Strategies in the Historic Period (2007)
Previous research indicates that, following European colonization, animal husbandry did not replace hunting as the primary source of meat in the diet of southeastern Native Americans until the early nineteenth century. However, while the introduction of Eurasian domesticated animals had little immediate impact on the lives of indigenous peoples in the Southeast,the expansion of the European market economy had profound implications for the economic and subsistence strategies of Native Americans...
Degrees of Change: The Transition from Paleoindian to Archaic (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cabinets of Curiosities: Collections and Conservation in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition between the Paleoindian (13,000–8000) and Archaic (8000–1000) periods continues to elude North American archaeologists. It is inferred from archaeological evidence that human populations were nomadic hunter-gatherers during both periods. The creation of storage pits, however, provides...
Delayed-Return Hunter-Gatherers in the Horn of Africa? Faunal and Radiometric Data from the Guli Waabayo Rock Shelter in Southern Somalia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental changes during the African Humid Period (~11,000-5,000 BP) are associated with the emergence of new social and economic strategies among some hunter-gatherers in northern and eastern Africa. In response to Early Holocene climatic amelioration, foragers in southwestern Libya and the Lake Victoria Basin decreased their mobility and...
The Demise of the European Neolithic Mode of Animal Husbandry: A Combined Effect of Milk Consumption, Zoonotic Diseases, and Genetic Changes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A new form of husbandry developed by the Neolithic settlers of Europe provided solid foundations for their unprecedented growth and sustainability. Its constituting elements comprised the secondary product’s mode of exploitation, the effective adaptation of major domesticates to different environmental and ecological zones, and changes in their genomes....
Demographic Collapse and Deintensification in Protohistoric Alta California (2017)
Decreased human population densities associated with European exploration and colonialism in western North America may explain the historic observations of bountiful game that contrasts so drastically with the archaeological record on resource intensification. At Kathy’s Rockshelter in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills, California, there is a clear prehistoric trend towards resource depression of artiodactyls and increased dependence on small mammals, freshwater mussels, geophytes, and other...
A Descriptive Analysis of Animal Paleopathology from the Archaeological Site of Salmon Ruins (2016)
This thesis research is a small part of the greater potential study of the interactions between people in prehistory and the animals they relied upon for food and ritual items. Analysis will compare the prevalence of osteological changes and abnormalities in the remains of wild animals and domestic turkeys at Salmon Ruin, New Mexico. Domestic turkeys, being influenced by the hand of humans, are unique cases of paleopathology that could potentially provide insight into the domestication and care...
Developing Regional Isotopic Baselines to Trace Resource Acquisition Patterns in the Mesa Verde Area of the American Southwest (2018)
The analysis of strontium and oxygen isotopes in archaeological bone is commonly used to trace human mobility and migrations. We are using this isotopic approach to reconstruct changes in human access to large animal resources acquired through trading and hunting in the Mesa Verde area between 750-1280 AD. Current work is focused on determining the isotopic variability of the complex geology surrounding the primary study area. Isotopic analyses have been conducted on non-cultural archaeological...
Development of Pastoralism in Prehistoric Central Asia: A Case Study at Koken, East Kazakhstan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The tradition of practicing mobile pastoralism in Central Asia’s steppe, forest-steppe, and foothill regions stretches back to at least the Bronze Age period (ca. 3500–800 BC). This preliminary study explores environmental biases and related human choices in livestock management during the period of early emergence and...
Deviant or Normal? Assessing Anomalies in Middle Stone Age Small Prey Exploitation (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. Studies of forager economies in southern Africa have documented changes in subsistence strategies between the Middle and Later Stone Age. As evidenced by the disproportionate frequencies of faunal remains from large, gregarious grazers, the prevailing interpretation has been that MSA foragers...
Diachronic Patterns in Subsistence at Swan Point, Tanana Valley, Alaska (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Approximately 1000 years ago, the archaeological record of Southcentral and interior Alaska shows a shift toward the increased use of fish caches, semi-subterranean houses, permanent year-round villages, and the appearance of ranked societies. Ultimately, the highly mobile big game hunter-gatherer way of life was supplanted by more intensive resource...
Diagnostic Elements and Interobserver Variation in the Indentification of Fish Bones (2017)
Research by us and others has demonstrated that the taxonomic identification of fish bones from archaeological sites varies between analysts. While rarely acknowledged, this variation may be significant enough to result in different interpretations of site function and seasonality. The level of specificity of identifications and the elements considered identifiable are two important sources of variation. Other factors include the nature of the reference collection used and the experience of the...
Did Bears Make the Fur Trade Possible? Seasonal Resource Scheduling during Wisconsin’s Early and Middle Historic Periods (2017)
Data have been found to suggest increased consumption of bear meat at Eastern Wisconsin sites during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While bear remains are rare at these sites, they occur at generally higher densities than at Late Prehistoric Late Woodland and Oneota sites in the same region. Ethnohistoric evidence, supported by zooarchaeological data from the eighteenth century Meskwaki Grand Village (Bell Site) indicate that ritualized disposal behaviors may have impacted the...
Did Tlingit and Haida eat sea otters during the pre-contact period? an issue of intellectual property and cultural heritage (2017)
In recent years, zooarchaeological studies have been designed to address a variety of issues in conservation biology, but rarely has zooarchaeology been used to document cultural practices that are currently under public scrutiny. Use of sea otters is part of Tlingit and Haida cultural heritage. Conducted with Sealaska Heritage Institute, this project attempts to show how laboratory analysis of archaeological collections can document butchery and processing practices that have direct...
The Diet and Identity of Enslaved African Americans in the Upper South (2018)
Enslaved African Americans in the Upper South worked and lived in both rural and urban settings as farm laborers, cooks, house servants, miners, and roustabouts. Their quality of life and cultural identity may be best understood by how their food was acquired, the types of plants and animals eaten, and the recipes they created. This paper provides a summary of the enslaved African American diet in the Upper South and compares it with that of their white owners as well as with enslaved...
Diet at the Edge of Fort Ancient: Preliminary Faunal Analysis from an Unusually Positioned House at the Guard Site, Dearborn County, Indiana (2015)
This study analyzes faunal remains from a recently excavated house at the Guard Site in southeast Indiana, which was occupied by the Fort Ancient culture between AD 1000 and AD 1300 during a period of optimal climate in the American Midwest. During such periods, abundant resources and low stress allow people to pursue more desired resources. In the case of Fort Ancient, the key species was the white-tailed deer. We hypothesize that Guard’s inhabitants were free to pursue large deer in the primes...
The Diet of Dogs: Dental Microwear Texture Analysis to Interpret the Human-Canine Connection in Prehistoric North America (2018)
The archaeology of dog-keeping by indigenous Native North Americans enriches our understanding of ways people conceptualized their environments in the past. Finding new ways to investigate this topic contributes to broader anthropological knowledge about relationships among humans and the natural world. In this paper, I present exploratory research to examine ways that domestic dogs were maintained and the assumed value of dogs among Native Americans who lived in the Ohio River valley, in Plains...
Dietary and Environmental Implications of Animal Use in the Okeechobee Basin Area of Florida (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In order to gain a better understanding of the faunal diet composition of Native Americans in south-central Florida, an examination was conducted to determine which types of animals appeared most frequently within tree island assemblages. Of the faunal remains examined from a 2016 excavation, all were identified to at least an animal’s taxonomic order,...
Dietary Change during the Middle and Late Pleistocene in the Northwestern Mediterranean: New Insights from the Analysis of Rabbit Assemblages (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 Europe, medium- to large-sized herbivores are widely considered to have formed the bulk of the human diet during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. In contrast, small fast prey taxa were allegedly rarely exploited. Here, we report new data for a number of leporid assemblages from Southern...
Dietary Evidence for the Timing and Diversity of Mesoamerican Turkey Husbandry (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the absence of morphological changes, clear genetic markers, and pen structures, the archaeological evidence for turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) husbandry and domestication in Mesoamerica relies primarily on identifying dietary shifts in ancient turkeys. As in the American Southwest, captive Mesoamerican turkeys exhibit greater consumption of maize than...
Dietary Variation, Population Aggregation, and Foraging Strategies on Santa Rosa Island during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine dietary change on northern Santa Rosa Island, California, at the mouth of Cañada Verde, the location of the historically documented village of Silimihi, the third-largest village on the island by baptisms. There is evidence of a human presence at this location from the middle Holocene (4560–4140 95% cal BP) through the period of Spanish contact....
A Differential Recovery Checklist for Zooarchaeology in the U.S. Southwest (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Differential recovery refers to the ways that faunal assemblages are sampled from the archaeological record. Its effects can be pernicious when interpreting data from multiple assemblages. As such, the topic is a mainstay in contemporary zooarchaeological research; however, in the U.S. Southwest differential recovery has received less attention. One reason...
Ding Dung: Animal Enclosures, Digested Bones and, Where was the Livestock in the Archaeological Site? Evidences from Experimentation and Zooarchaeology from Late Prehistory in the Western Mediterranean (2017)
One of the most intriguing questions in many archaeological sites is to elucidate where the livestock was kept, and which and how many animals were herded. This is particularly compelling in Late Prehistory, when many sites were heavily fortified, and all the space intramuros seemed to be occupied by domestic buildings. Some disciplines, such as micromorphology and palynology, help to answer some of these questions. In this paper, we will provide a perspective from zooarchaeology, which is one...
Direct evidence of milk consumption from ancient human dental calculus (2015)
Humans have exploited animal milk as a food resource for at least 8500 years, but the origins, spread, and scale of prehistoric and historic dairying remain poorly understood. Indirect lines of evidence, such as lipid isotopic ratios of pottery residues, faunal mortality profiles, and LP allele frequencies, imply a complex history of dairying at the level of populations. However, in order to understand how, where, and when humans consumed milk products, it is necessary to link evidence of...
Discard, Stockpile, or Commemorative Cairn: Interpreting the Bison Skull Pile at the Ravenscroft Late Paleoindian Bison Kill, Oklahoma Panhandle (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bison crania without mandibles form a vertical cluster in the earliest of two arroyos at the ~10,400 year old Ravenscroft bison kill site in the Oklahoma panhandle. The skulls were stacked on the arroyo floor, eventually forcing subsequent kills to relocate to an adjacent arroyo. A combined total of five winter kill events have been documented in the two...