Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
376-400 (1,581 Records)
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....
Differential Effects of End-Pleistocene Climate Change and Early Humans on Megafaunal Spatial Distribution in the American Southwest (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The end of the Pleistocene is characterized by pronounced climate change, human arrival and dispersal, and the extinction of a variety of taxa, the majority of which were mammals. During this period, the continent experienced the loss of thirty-eight genera of mammals, over 70% of which are classified as megafauna. Historically, the cause of these...
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...
Discoveries in Hatteras: a zooarchaeological study of native American consumption patterns. (2016)
The Cape Creek site has been an area of continuous archaeological focus since the inception of the Croatoan Archaeological Project in 2009. This paper will discuss the zooarchaeological methodologies implemented to study Native American use of their immediate landscape and the natural resources of the area during the period before European contact and subsequent consumption adaptations. This will focus on the exploration and analysis of faunal data recovered during the 2012-2015 excavation...
A Discussion of Animal Matters (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Matters: Ethics in Zooarchaeology from Discovery to Display" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A discussion of ethics in any area of archaeology requires input from a diverse array of people and perspectives. We aim to synthesize the main points from the session and allow a space for individuals to provide their experiences and insights on topics such as decolonization, best practices for specimen acquisition and...
Distinguishing Cervids and Bovids in the Americas Using Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS): Authentication and Development of New Peptide Markers (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cervidae family has long been central to societies throughout history, whether as venison meat or raw materials, as gifts from long-distance trades, and as trophies in ceremonial acts. However, species-level cervid exploitation and management remain underexplored due to identification difficulties from other sympatric cervids and bovids. Prior research...
The Distribution of Articulated Animal Remains: An Analysis of Household and Community Ritual in Chaco Canyon (2015)
Chaco Canyon is thought to have been a regional center during the Pueblo II period. Its identity as such makes it a particularly interesting locale at which to compare the relationship between public community-based and more exclusive household-based rituals. In this paper, the nature of articulated animal remains and their deposition are examined in order to elucidate social relationships at both the community and household scale, particularly at the largest and most well-studied site, Pueblo...
Divergence of Domestic Dog Morphology through Deep Time (2018)
The modern domestic dog is behaviourally and morphologically far removed from its ancient counterpart. Increasingly, research has demonstrated that using modern comparative collections for identifying domestic animals in archaeological contexts is problematic. This is likely the result of the intensive breeding that modern animals have undergone in at least the last two centuries. It is unclear how far back the current modern morphology of dogs goes, or how different ancient dogs were from their...
Diverging Harvesting Strategies of Atlantic Walruses: An Intercontinental Comparison (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we compare historic Atlantic walrus commercial and subsistence exploitation in Svalbard (Norway) and Foxe Basin (Arctic Canada), respectively. Data are drawn from osteometric analysis of zooarchaeological surface remains at harvest locales (examined both in situ and in museum collections). In studying harvest strategies of the same species...
Diversity and Use of Ducks and Loons at the Hornblower II Site, MA (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent evaluation of avifauna from the Hornblower II site on Martha’s Vineyard has revealed a rich diversity of birds, including Red-breasted loon (Gavia stellata), Common loon (G. immer), and various dabbling and diving ducks (Anatidae). The majority of the identified assemblage is represented by Anseriformes (70.6%) and Gaviiformes (17.6%), with very few...
The Diversity of Domestic Dogs in Highland Chiapas: Long-Distance Exchange and Specialized Morphotypes (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Complex Human-Animal Interactions in the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> As the oldest known domesticated species, dogs and humans have had a shared and enmeshed history in the Americas for thousands of years. By Spanish contact, historic accounts describe named, specialized morphotypes such as the hairless xoloitzcuintli and the short-legged tlalchichi; many questions remain about the origin and...
Do dingoes hold the key to understanding human behavioural change in ancient Australia? (2015)
Archaeological evidence suggests dingos were brought to Australia sometime during the mid-Holocene (c. 5,000-3,500 years ago). Their introduction coincides with significant changes in human behaviour, specifically in technology, settlement patterns and diet. While their relationship with Aboriginal people is commonly held to have been commensal, this interesting amalgamation of changes certainly begs the question of whether there may be a dingo ‘signature’ in the archaeological record....
Doctrines of Discard in the Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom: Social Stratigraphies of Refuse Mound Deposition in Southern Nigeria, AD 1400–1900 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom (southern Nigeria) was for centuries involved in far-reaching trade networks – with the inland and coastal Yorùbá ìlú (city-states), European merchants from various nations, and eventually the British Lagos Colony following its establishment in 1862. During this period, the Ìjẹ̀bú...
Documentation of Missouri White-tailed Deer Chronoclines: Implications for Archaeology, Paleoecology, and Conservation Biology (2015)
Multiple ecological factors (e.g., Bergmann’s rule, competition, reproductive rate, home range size, food quality and quantity) may cause changes in animal body size over time. White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are ideal for studying these variables due to their importance today (to hunters and to wildlife enthusiasts), their known phenotypic plasticity in response to ecological factors, and their high frequency in zooarchaeological collections. Using post-craninal, weight-bearing bone...
Does the Emergence of Paleolithic Body Ornamentation Signal an Unprecedented Aptitude for Symbolling Behavior or just a New Application? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Given the collective evidence for the Paleolithic in Eurasia, it is peculiar that the emergence of durable art in archaeological records is taken to reflect a parallel emergence for the capacity of hominins to engage in symboling behavior of any sort. The ample record of burial practices of during the Middle...
Dog 6: The Life and Death of A Good Boy in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Burial, Space, and Memory of Unusual Death" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists encountered a series of dog burials during an excavation of the eighteenth-century Public Armoury site in Colonial Williamsburg. Among these already uncommon eighteenth-century burials, one dog in particular stood out: Dog 6, an elderly male with evidence of multiple healed injuries, unusual skeletal...
Dog Burials and Healed Cranial Lesions: Exploring the Human-Dog Bond in the American Southwest (2016)
Since the initial domestication of the dog, humans and their canid companions have maintained a close connection. Dogs have been employed as hunters, beasts of burden, mousers, refuse disposers, ritual guardians, and emotional support. Also, given their physical size and profile, dogs have often been considered an animal underfoot. Despite dogs’ myriad working conditions, zooarchaeological research illustrates a non-random pattern of cranial lesions to prehistoric domesticated dogs from many...
Dog Burials at Phipps Bend. In: the Phipps Bend Archaeological Project (1981)
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Dogs in Space: An Application of Machine-Learning Geometric Morphometric Analyses for Species Determination of Large Canids Using Mandibles (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Machine-Learning Approaches to Studying Ancient Human-Environmental Interactions" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A persistent issue in zooarchaeology is the differentiation of domesticated dogs from wolves and coyotes from fragmentary archaeological remains. This is particularly problematic in regions where size cannot be used as a factor, such as the North American northern Great Plains. This poster presents the use...
Dogs of Death: An Evaluation of Canid Remains from a Mortuary Eneolithic Cave Site in Ukraine (2018)
Burials of dog skulls and full dog skeletons have been uncovered at several Eneolithic Tripolye (5100-2900 cal BC) sites suggesting that dogs held a special symbolic role for the Tripolye compared to other domestic fauna. To evaluate human-dog relationships in Tripolye culture and funerary context, we examined dogs from a single mortuary site (Site 17) located in Verteba Cave (3951-2620 cal BC), Ternopil Oblast, Western Ukraine. Symbolic representations of canids have been observed on some...
The Dogs of Housepit 54 (2025)
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. This study investigates the variable relationships between people and domestic dogs over time within Housepit 54 at the Bridge River site, British Columbia. While viewing domestication as an ongoing social process, this research aims to demonstrate how the roles of dogs...