Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
876-900 (1,356 Records)
Past and present human-animal relationships have always been shaped by culturally-based beliefs, perceptions, and treatment of nonhuman animals, which in turn influence the lives of the animals in their environments. That being said, how accurate were ancient cultures in their attempts to understand animals, and how did subsequent human perceptions influence animal realities? What might it have been like as a nonhuman animal living near ancient peoples, based on biology and culture? What of the...
Performing Feasts and the Use of Animals in Ritual Contexts in Iron Age Ireland (2018)
Activities at large ceremonial complexes are interpreted as regional community endeavors that form group identities and reify social and political structures. Imposing monuments such as Dún Ailinne, Navan Fort, and Rathcrogan have provided tantalizing glimpses into ritual and ceremonial performances of the Irish Iron Age (500 BC-AD 500). Communal feasting has been suggested to be a key practice at these sites during the later periods of use. At feasts, social structure and identity are...
Perishable Politics: Food and the Everyday Sociopolitical Identity (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking about Eating: Theorizing Foodways in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gastropolitics are the creation and maintenance of social and political relationships through the making and consuming of meals. Archaeology allows us to recover the residues of meals and associated culinary equipment from secure contexts. Foodways data, when integrated with other data classes such as paleodemography and spatial...
Persistence in Pastoralist Practices During the Uruk Period at Tepe Farukhabad (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Uruk period (4100 - 3100 BCE) was a transformative time in Southwest Asia, marked by the precursors of writing, the rise of urbanization, and an intensification in cross-cultural interactions. Subsistence strategies were shifting as well, as hunting declined relative to herding and animals such as sheep and goats became favored for both their primary...
Persistence in Turkey Husbandry Practices in the Southwest and Four Corners Region: The Isotopic and Ethnohistorical Evidence (2018)
Research has demonstrated an independent domestication event of Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) occurred in the Southwestern USA between 200 BC—AD 500, which was separate from the domestication of turkey within the Mesoamerican world. While aDNA analyses revealed this as a separate and distinct event, we still know little about how turkey husbandry was practiced in the prehistoric Southwest, USA, Northwest, Mexico, and Four Corners regions. Our research applies carbon and nitrogen isotopes to a...
Perspectives on Pits of the Western Stemmed Tradition: An Analysis on the Contents of Feature 59 at the Cooper’s Ferry Site (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavation of a pit feature designated as Feature 59 (F59) from the Cooper’s Ferry site (10IH73) in western Idaho offers a unique opportunity to explore more about the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) and how people used pits in the Far West. This project analyzes the contents from within F59. These contents include the skeleton of a wolverine (Gulo gulo)...
Pest, Prey or Domesticate: Odocoileus virginianus in the Maya World (2016)
In 1982, Pohl and Feldman questioned whether the ancient Maya had been in the process of domesticating white-tail deer. The possibility that the Maya actively managed deer populations in proximity to human settlements deserves detailed consideration. Although white-tail deer remains are abundant in zooarchaeological assemblages, comprehensive size and demographic studies have not yet been undertaken to help establish which motives might inspired efforts toward herd management. A lack of metrical...
Picking Up the Pieces: The Continued Influence and Impact of Redding's “Breaking the Mold” on Animal Domestication (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. Richard Redding’s work on “breaking the mold” on how we explain the development of food production is emblematic of the major contributions he made to zooarchaeological thinking: his creativity, curiosity, and willingness to question dearly held beliefs. In this paper, we overview some of Redding’s many...
The Pied Piper in Boston: A Zooarchaeological Analysis of Rats at the Unity Court Tenements (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology, Faunal, and Foodways Studies" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The 2016-17 excavations at Boston’s former Unity Court Tenements yielded an incredibly rich assemblage of 19th-century artifacts. These tenements, in operation 1830-1880, served the ever-growing and changing community of Boston’s North End, and it was expected that their excavation would uncover the complex material culture of those living...
Pig Management in Neolithic North China: Foddering and Social Change in the Western Liao River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent models for pig domestication in China have suggested that initial domestication was contingent upon millet cultivation, which allowed for foddering through agricultural surplus. For this study, a combination of bulk collagen carbon and nitrogen isotopic analysis and compound...
Pigs by Sea: The Establishment of Pig Husbandry on Wallacean Islands during the Late Holocene (2018)
Domestic pigs play a crucial role in the socioeconomic systems of Island Southeast Asian cultures today. However, the timing of their introduction into the region during the late Holocene and details of their use by prehistoric inhabitants is not entirely clear. The introduction of domestic pigs by maritime Neolithic horticulturalists to the Wallacean island region of eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste, which has never been connected to a major landmass, appears to have been an advantageous...
Pimería Alta Missions Fauna
This project consists of zooarchaeological data from two Spanish mission sites on the land of the O'odham people located in what is now southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. This region was referred to by the Spanish as the Pimería Alta. Dozens of Spanish colonial missions were established in the Pimería Alta region beginning in the 1690s by Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Kino. Missions were established within existing Native American communities. While the ostensible motivation for...
Pioneering Poultry: A Morphometric Investigation of Domestic Chickens (Gallus gallus) in Preindustrial North America (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. Chicken bones are common in many historic faunal assemblages. Historic accounts indicate that domestic chickens introduced to North America by European colonists did well and multiplied quickly, but provide little information on the origins, characteristics, or roles poultry played in the North...
“Place for a Walrus to Haul Out”: Marine Mammals and Polynya Archaeology in Northern Foxe Basin, Nunavut, Arctic Canada (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across Inuit Nunangat (the traditional Inuit territories of what is now Canada), the Little Ice Age (LIA) climate change episode likely resulted in significant changes in seasonal sea-ice abundance, thereby affecting relatively delicate coastal food webs. In this paper, we present the results-to-date of recent survey and excavation at Uglit (NfHd-1), a...
Plant and Animal Consumption in the Market Street Chinatown, San Jose, California (2015)
The Market Street Chinatown was a major urban Chinese community in nineteenth century San Jose, California. From 1866 to 1887, the community housed and served as a home base to several thousand Chinese residents and laborers. Excavated in the 1980s, the Market Street Chinatown yielded an incredibly rich collection of material culture as well as faunal and floral remains. This paper examines food consumption and food choice amongst Market Street’s nineteenth century Chinese residents. The author...
Plant and Animal Remains from Old Babylonian Ur (2018)
Archaeologists have been examining the great cities of ancient southern Mesopotamia for well over a century now, but as yet we have limited understanding of their subsistence economies. For decades researchers more or less ignored the wealth of faunal and botanical remains in and around ancient Mesopotamian architecture. Over the course of the twentieth century researchers began to recover animal bones and teeth, but as few digs dry-screened or floated their soils the resulting assemblages...
Plants, Animals, and Food Choice Within the Market Street Chinatown, San Jose, California (2015)
The Market Street Chinatown was a major urban Chinese community in nineteenth century San Jose, California. From 1866 to 1887, the community housed and served as a home base to several thousand Chinese residents and laborers. Excavated in the 1980s, the Market Street Chinatown yielded an incredibly rich collection of material culture as well as faunal and floral remains. This paper examines food consumption and food choice amongst Market Street's nineteenth century Chinese residents. The author...
Playing with Your Food to Feed the Masses: A Zooarchaeological Perspective at Teotihuacan, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animals are invariably integrated into the intricate makings of human culture, providing material evidence to reconstruct ancient urban foodways that influence and structure sociopolitical identities, practices, and ideologies. We explore the concept of production and...
Pleistocene Horses in the Archaeological Record: A Focus on the Great Basin (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a long history of horse exploitation throughout Eurasia; for instance, the Boxgrove site, England (500 kya), the Schöningen site, Germany (350 kya), and numerous Late Pleistocene sites spread across Eurasia (from the Aurignacian thru the Magdalenian 45 kya–15 kya). The evidence suggests that horses were only second in line of importance to...
Plucked Macaws: Evidence of Regular Feather Harvesting at Chaco Canyon (2017)
Macaws are not native to the American Southwest, but were imported into this region from central Mexico for hundreds of years. Recent research has demonstrated that the wing feathers of Southwestern turkeys were regularly plucked, as evidenced by significant scarring on the birds’ ulnae. This paper provides a macroscopic analysis of macaw skeletal remains from Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo Arroyo in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and argues that these elements also show evidence of a practice of regular...
Pocket Gophers as Food? The Zooarchaeological Investigation of An Unusual Woodland Period Assemblage (2018)
The Rainbow site (13PM91) is a multi-component Middle to Late Woodland period site situated within the tallgrass prairie of northwest Iowa. Excavated in the late 1970’s, the site remains an important example due to its well excavated and substantial faunal collection. The current study focuses on the reanalysis of a concentration of pocket gopher (Geomys bursarius) remains found within the Early-Late Woodland horizon C (AD 550-620). The surprising number and spatial concentration of pocket...
Political Economy at a Casma Valley Middle Horizon Center: Evidence from Pan de Azúcar de Nivín, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2017 the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológico Nivín seeks to clarify the cultural affiliation of the groups that occupied the middle Casma Valley, Peru. Architectural and ceramic features demonstrate the influence of both Wari and Casma cultural traditions at Pan de Azúcar de Nivín (PAN), a site occupied AD 950-1150. While the Wari Empire expanded from...
Popularización: aspectos favorables y negativos para la meliponicultura del siglo XXI (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La meliponicultura en México, así como en gran parte del mundo, ha experimentado un creciente interés y popularidad. Un mayor número de personas y grupos se están involucrando en la actividad lo que ha llevado a su expansión tanto de las regiones donde se practica, como en el número de...
Possible Evidence of Sloth Butchery: Results from a Faunal Analysis of Padre Nuestro Cavern, Dominican Republic (2016)
Between 2005 and 2010, dive teams from the Indiana University Bloomington Center for Underwater Science performed surface collections of the entrance chamber to Padre Nuestro Cavern, a submerged freshwater limestone cavern located in the East National Park in the southeastern peninsula of the Dominican Republic. They extracted Chican ostionoid ceramics indicating use of the cave by the Taino culture (ca. AD 1000-1492), Casimiroid lithics indicative of the Archaic culture (ca. 6000-500 BC), and...
The Potential for Using Long Bone Measurements to Determine Breed of Gallus gallus domesticus and its Implications for the Archaeological Record (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Poultry remains are often found in archaeological excavations and while the species can usually be identified, there has been little research on breed identification or purpose (egg production vs. meat production). This research aims to determine if differences exist between the long bone measurements of modern chicken breeds which can be useful for the...