Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
826-850 (1,356 Records)
While Pleistocene-Holocene archaeofaunas from the Iberian peninsula are relatively well-documented, these data are often considered in isolation from the larger Atlantic context. In this paper, I consider archaeofaunas from Eastern Iberia - Portugal and the Galicia region of Spain - in comparison with what we know about animal exploitation in Atlantic Morocco and the East Coast of North America. I assess the nature and completeness of the archaeofaunal record in these regions and explore...
A Novel Approach to the Identification of Dog Breeds in Highland Chiapas, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The utilization of dental morphology for the identification of different dog breeds in archaeological contexts has recently emerged as a promising new avenue for zooarchaeological methodologies, particularly in cases differentiating between coated and hairless breeds. Recent zooarchaeological studies from the Early Postclassic period (ca. AD...
The Number of Distinct Elements (NDE): An alternative measure of faunal abundance (2017)
NISP (Number of Identified SPecimens) and MNE (Minimum Number of Elements) are frequently used as measures of anatomical abundances in archaeology. Recent experimental results suggest that NISP provides estimates of skeletal abundances that are less robust than those based on MNE. However, our analysis of paired NISP-MNE data shows that MNE is prone to inflate the representation of rare parts. Moreover, MNE is known for being severely impacted by aggregation methods. These fundamental problems...
Nutritional Benefits of Bone Fat in Rabbits (Leporidae): Implications for Understanding Prehistoric Human Foraging (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone fat has been recognized by prehistoric and modern societies as an important source of lipids and other nutrients. Experimental and ethnoarchaeological research have provided a number of archaeological correlates for identifying the role that such nutritional resources were exploited by prehistoric peoples. To date, the bulk of such research has...
The Nutritional Value of Pacific Herring: an Ancient Cultural Keystone Species on the Northwest Coast of North America (2015)
Pacific herring play a special ecological role in North Pacific marine ecosystems by converting phytoplankton into energy consumable by a variety of animals, including humans. Northwest Coast peoples have been consuming herring since the early Holocene, and patterns of usage likely changed over time. Herring are available in different forms during different times of the year. This paper will evaluate the nutritional value of herring and seasonal herring products vis à vis other Northwest...
Oceanic Tendencies: Ritual Landscapes, Oyster Shells, and the Social Worlds of Marine Resource Exploitation in Early Medieval Britain (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Oyster shells have been discovered across multiple sites in Britain, often as part of shell middens which have been interrupted almost exclusively as food refuse. But whether inland or by the sea, people in Britain had used oysters and other molluscs to help make their religion. Oyster shells...
Of Foragers and Farmers: The Influence of Population Interaction on Faunal Diversity and Abundances in Zooarchaeological Assemblages (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological measures of faunal diversity are commonly used to assess prehistoric diet breadth, paleoenvironmental conditions, hunting technology, and economic orientation. In addition, hunter-gatherers are usually assumed to have more diverse faunal assemblages in comparison to food producers. Ethnoarchaeological data from central African neighboring...
Of Islands and Dogs: Ethnohistoric and Isotopic Pathways toward Understanding Past Dog Diet in Tropical Oceania (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dogs in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric accounts suggest people treated dogs differently across Oceania at the time of European contact. European accounts often state that the dogs of Oceania were fed plant foods such as breadfruit, coconut, yams, and taro. Some sources also reference dogs eating fish or taking on the roles of scavengers and hunters. Collectively these accounts...
Of Pigs and People in Colonial Guatemala: A Zooarchaeological Historical Approach (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among all the Eurasian domesticates that were introduced consequently to the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, pigs hold a singular place. Unlike larger ungulates such as horses and cattle, their rearing does not require large resources which makes them...
Oh Deer: A Zooarchaeological Approach to Understanding Hominin Behavior during the Last Interglacial (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of hominin subsistence behavior during the Last Interglacial is limited. Le Grand Abri aux Puces (GAP), a cave in Southern France in the foothills of the Alps, can provide a closer look into subsistence behavior as most of its layers are dated to the Last Interglacial. It has been suggested that hominins living around GAP during...
Old Bones, New Data: Pigs and Dogs from Prehistoric Non Pa Wai, Lopburi Province, Central Thailand in a Regional Context (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 1980s and 1990s, excavations by the Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project (TAP) at prehistoric Non Pa Wai in the Khao Wong Prachan Valley of central Thailand produced a large assemblage of animal bones. These include many pig and dog bones that provide evidence for management for food. Since their initial...
Olsen and Olsen's Identity Crisis in Faunal Studies (1982)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
On Finance: Toward an Archaeology of Debt of Colonial New Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the results of faunal, ceramic, and lithic analyses of the San Antonio del Embudo midden, a refuse site for a small Hispano agropastoral community in the northern borderlands of the Spanish Empire. These analyses are informed by both archived and new translations of the last will and testaments of the original proprietors of the San...
On Manitou and Consanguineal Respect between Human and Animal Societies in Southern New England (2017)
By definition, hunter-gatherer societies rely upon few, if any, domesticated animals. Domestication is counter to many hunter-gatherer worldviews, where human and non-human animals are seen as sharing a literal biological connection. From here, in essence, domestication is akin to slavery. Examples from the ethnohistoric and archaeological records will be used to illustrate how local Native groups in southern New England treated wild and domestic animals and animal remains in culturally...
On Point-Cloud 9: A Replicable Protocol to Model 3D Point Clouds of Artifacts as 3D Surfaces (2017)
The comparative study of artifact-form across time and space is fundamental to archaeological inquiry. Increasingly accessible 3D-scanning technology has allowed digital models of artifacts to have a prominent role in archaeological analyses. With this technology, researchers can generate digital 3D models and point clouds representing scanned artifacts to be later analyzed and distributed to other scientists through open source repositories. However, because comparative morphometric analyses of...
On the Ecodynamics of Fisheries at Tse-whit-zen (2017)
On the northern Pacific Coast of North America, fish play an extremely important role in conceptual models related to hunter-gatherer evolution and social dynamics of household production and resource control. Our ability to rigorously apply archaeo-fish remains to these models is limited by substantial data requirements including well-documented contexts, high-resolution chronology, control over complex site formation processes and taphonomy, as well as large sample sizes. The 2004 excavation...
On the Edge of the Colonial Sphere: The Effects of Indirect Interaction on Subsistence Strategies in Northern Alaska (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. How did trade participation impact human-environmental interactions? It is known that the fur trade was a significant part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life in southern Alaska. However, the effects of the fur trade and the whaling industry on northern Alaskan lifeways have been understudied....
On the Remains of Fish Scales from Archaeological Sites (1974)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
On the Role of Sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) in Northwest Coast Fisheries: The View from the Tse-whit-zen Site (45CA523), Coastal Washington (2015)
Though the study of human-prey animal relationships in the Pacific Northwest has focused largely on salmonid species (family Salmonidae) and their hypothetical connections to ancient increases in social complexity, a growing body of research demonstrates that many more fishes than have been previously recognized played key roles in the diets and social systems of peoples past and present. The Tse-whit-zen fauna, with over 80,000 fish bone specimens identified by ongoing zooarchaeological...
On the Zooarchaeology of Bears in Southeastern North America (2016)
Ever since Irving Hallowell's classic 1926 study of the special mythic status of bears in the Subarctic, anthropologists are generally aware that many peoples throughout the world have treated bears as something more than a straight forward subsistence resource. Hallowell attributed that special relationship between Subarctic humans and bears to some striking parallels between bear and human behaviors and physiologies. If that were indeed the case, then one would expect to see similar...
On Using Archaeology within an Indigenous Rights-Based Approach to Sustainability (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the U.S., indigenous communities often suffer poor health at far greater rates than non-native populations. Lower life expectancy and the disproportionate disease burden exist often because their local food diversity and sources have been diminished by restricted access and economic stresses. To remedy these health...
Oneota Subsistence Practices at the Christenson Site (13PK407) (2015)
The Christenson site (13PK407) is a Moingona phase Oneota site along the Des Moines River, dating to around AD 1250. Excavations took place in both 1983 and 2001 in order to salvage the site from erosion by the Des Moines River. Analysis of the 1983 deer remains indicated a mid- to late-winter season of death, suggesting that the Christenson site represented a winter occupation, This season of occupations differs from other Moingona phase Oneota sites, and this reanalysis of the 2001 faunal...
Ongoing Investigations into Late Woodland and Early Caddo Subsistence in the Bois d’Arc Creek Watershed, Northeast Texas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bois d’Arc Creek is located at the western margin of the Caddo region, feeding into the Red River from northeastern Texas. In 2019–2021, AR Consultants, Inc. excavated six sites in the Bois d’Arc Creek watershed, yielding archaeofaunas associated with Late Woodland and Early Caddo occupations. These sites tend to be located on terraces near the creek...
The Ontological Mammoth Body: Varieties of the Human-Mammoth Ritual Drama Mediated by Cultural Interactions with Mammoth Remains in Pavlonian Moravia and Mezinian Ukraine (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric sources show hunters burnt the bones of prey or hung them on trees, heaped them on piles, deposited them in bogs, etc., in order to propitiate nature spirits such as the “Master of Animals” for game resurrection...
Open Ocean Fisheries of Indigenous California: Origins and Technological Inferences (2024)
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. Pelagic fishing entails substantial risks and investments in fishing equipment, including sturdy boats, paddles, hooks, lines, nets, and spears. In the context of Indigenous California, this fishing practice has been linked to population growth and the evolution of fishing technologies over the...