Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
101-125 (1,356 Records)
Coan Hall is the site of the first English settlement on the Northern Neck of Virginia, established by John Mottrom, an English merchant-planter, around 1640. Mottrom resided there with his family, servants, and slaves until his death in 1655. His descendants occupied the house until the early 18th century. It was situated on the banks of the Coan River, a brackish tributary of the Potomac River that empties into the Chesapeake Bay. Representative samples of shellfish, predominantly those of...
Archaic Fishing in the Eastern Woodlands: An Examination of Social Causes and Environmental Variation (2017)
The Eastern Archaic Faunal Working Group brings together researchers and nearly sixty faunal datasets representing twenty-one sites from four major sub-regions of the Eastern Woodlands. In this paper, we focus on resource availability and the potential causal relationship to cultural choice. The Archaic Period archaeological sites in our study are located in the Mid-South and Ohio River Valley regions, and are well known for their composition of shell in the form of middens or mounds. In a...
Archaic Tattooing and Bundle Keeping in Tennessee, ca. 1600 BC (2018)
The Fernvale archaeological site in Williamson County, Tennessee, is a multi-component site that includes a significant Late Archaic cemetery and occupation dated ca. 1600 BC. Although the site was excavated in 1985, it was not fully analyzed or published for nearly three decades. Formal analysis of zooarchaeological materials from Fernvale took place from 2007-2012 as part of an overall effort to reassess the site assemblage. In this paper we describe findings generated by combining traditional...
Are You a Tool? A Zooarchaeological Analysis of Worked Bone from Wupatki National Monument (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological analysis provides details on the processes used to create and modify bone artifacts and the potential use of these materials by past peoples. This poster provides the results of faunal analysis, usewear analysis, scanning electron microscopy, and experimental archaeology to examine bone artifacts from Wupatki National Monument. The data...
Arrggghhh Braaaaiiiins: The Zooarchaeology of a Mid-19th Century Privy in New Orleans’ Historic French Quarter (2018)
In this paper we present analysis of faunal remains recovered from a mid-19th century privy at 936 St. Peter Street, an archaeological site in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter. Although the faunal assemblage includes domestic trash related to meals eaten by the site occupants, it is dominated by a tremendous number of caprine cranial elements. These cranial bones show a consistent butchery pattern indicating that site occupants were harvesting caprine brains in large numbers, presumably for...
Artiodactyl Exploitation in Northeastern California during the Terminal Prehistoric/Protohistoric Time Periods: Evidence of Environmental Rebound? (2017)
Artiodactyl representation in the archaeological record can be a particularly sensitive indicator of past human-environmental interactions due to their status as a high-ranking prey item. In this study we explore terminal prehistoric and protohistoric patterning of artiodactyl exploitation in the archaeofaunal record in Northeastern California. Specifically, this study examines previously published zooarchaeological data derived from residential sites situated along the Pit River in conjunction...
Assessing Evidence of Hunting as Subsistence Specialization at an Early Classic Period Hohokam Farmstead (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logan Simpson recently mitigated multiple prehistoric sites along the Middle Gila River in Arizona for the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Florence Flood Retarding Structure Rehabilitation project. One site, AZ U:15:836(ASM), is a small Hohokam farmstead within the Grewe-Casa Grande canal system. Recent investigations at the site identified evidence...
Assessing hominin involvement with the faunal assemblages from Bundu Farm and Pniel 6, Northern Cape, South Africa (2015)
The transition from the Early Stone Age (ESA) to the Middle Stone Age (MSA) represents an important technological shift in hominin behavioral evolution in southern Africa. Subsistence behaviors during this transition, however, are relatively unknown due to a lack of faunal preservation or insecure associations between lithic and faunal accumulations. Often, these sites originate from riverine, lakeshore, and spring deposits, locations that likely attracted hominin hunters and other carnivores in...
Assessing Human-Animal Interactions in Mesoamerica: Ancient Maya Use of the Black-Throated Bobwhite (Colinus nigrogularis) (2017)
This paper examines human-animal interaction between the ancient Maya and the black-throated bobwhite (Colinus nigrogularis), a small quail resident to Central America. We provide a literature review of the occurrence of bobwhite remains in Maya faunal assemblages. Unpublished faunal analyses by the primary author, in conjunction with the published literature, suggest that the bobwhite, like many animals in Mesoamerica, was of greater importance to the Maya than as a mere dietary food. We...
Assessing Response of Tse-whit-zen's Large-bodied Fish to Environmental Change using Sampling to Redundancy (2017)
Tse-whitzen is one of the largest village excavations on the Northwest Coast; more than 1,400 features were documented and an estimated 234,563 fish bones were recovered from ¼" mesh alone. While research potential is great, the challenge of sampling such a huge assemblage is daunting. Previous research has focused on the >1/8" mesh matrix from "C" buckets, which emphasizes small-bodied fishes. To track changing representation of large-bodied fish through time and space, we devised a method of...
Assessing Shellfish Discard for Discerning between Field Processing or Residential Relocation in the Subtropical Pacific Coast of South America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variability in site structure and shellfish assemblages from hunter-gatherer sites in the Pacific coast of Los Vilos (31°50 ’S, South America) has been attributed to changes in field processing decisions across the Holocene. However, these changes have not been evaluated considering...
Assessment of Late Quaternary Bison Diminution Using Linear Discriminant Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The proximate cause of reduction in the overall size of late Quaternary bison is the focus of continued debate. Some researchers contend that size reduction did not occur despite well-documented changes in climate and vegetation, while others link directional change in body size to changes in forage quality and availability or human predation. Historically,...
Avian Skeletal Part Representation at 49-KIS-050 (2016)
Zooarchaeological avifauna analyses demonstrate that wing elements tend to be overrepresented in archaeological assemblages from diverse temporal and cultural contexts. There have been several explanations for this phenomenon including bone density, differential transport and more recently, Bovy’s social zooarchaeological interpretations for the overall overabundance of wing elements, as well as specifically of distal wing elements in the Watmough Bay assemblage. The avifaunal assemblage...
Avifauna of the Bonneville Basin: Past Variation and Future Conservation (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating 20 Years of Support: Current Work by Recipients of the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship for Zooarchaeologists" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The final regression of Lake Bonneville during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition resulted in dramatic environmental changes in the Bonneville basin, followed by further environmental fluctuations throughout the Holocene. Recent research of faunal and floral...
Avifaunal Remains from the Palmrose Site (35CT47): Establishing Seasonality and Investigating Endangered Species (2018)
Avifaunal remains have great potential to improve archaeological understanding of the economy and subsistence of peoples who lived in the past, as well as to yield information about local ecology, environmental change, and past bird species distribution. The large assemblage of faunal remains from the three archaeological sites comprising the Seaside Collection from Seaside, OR, contains significant quantities of bird bone. Previous analyses of vertebrate remains (including birds) by Greenspan...
Awl Mighty Tools: Comparing Experimentally Created Animal Bone Tools to Archaeological Examples (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experimental archaeology supports our understanding of past lifeways and how artifactual materials were created. In zooarchaeology, its use in interpreting how previous populations may have crafted animal bone tools is imperative to identifying preforms and other stages of the manufacture process. The Northern Arizona University Faunal...
Background to New Methods in Zooarchaeology: Identifying, Storing, and Recording Faunal Collections that will be Used by other Researchers (2016)
In the past 15 years, we have seen significant methodological developments in zooarchaeology, including the uses of isotopic studies, aDNA, and geometric morphometrics. However, all of these methods depend on careful identification of animal bone materials and the preservation of their archaeological and stratigraphic context. This paper discusses basic methods of identifying, recording, archiving, and storing zooarchaeological collections in ways that will make them amenable to research by...
Balance on South Diamond: Using Faunal Analysis to Understand Biodiversity and Resource Use Trends in the Northern Mimbres Region (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Gila National Forest/Wilderness comprised of rich mountainous land spanning between western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. This land was once home to the people of the Mimbres culture. The environments within these natural areas vary due to different altitudes and precipitation, which also affect the variety and amount of ecological resources. Two sites...
Barn Owl (Tyto alba) Pellets as Environmental Proxies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Non-cultural deposits and animal accumulations have been important for reconstructing past environmental conditions. In western North America, packrat middens have been analyzed to infer past vegetation communities, precipitation rates, and other environmental variables. In this poster, we analyze owl-generated pellets deposited over a 1,500-year period at...
Bayesian Multilevel Models of Diachronic Dietary Trajectories (DDTs) from 13,000 years of Great Plains Faunal Exploitation (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists rely on long-term records of faunal remains to study significant diachronic changes in human-environmental interactions, including foraging-farming transitions, human-driven extinctions, animal translocations, and the development of complex societies. Here, we define the magnitude and direction of change observed in the...
A Bayesian Solution to the Controversy over the Identification of Bone Surface Modification in Paleoanthropology (2017)
Bone surface modification (BSM) remains a primary source of taphonomic inference in paleontological and archaeological contexts. However long-standing debates in BSM studies have undermined the utility of this approach. We use an objective machine-based learning algorithm rooted in Bayesian probability theory designed to quantify the level of uncertainty associated with a formal assignment of agent to individual BSM. Our multivariate Bayesian model, trained on large assemblages of...
Bear/Human Relationships in Southeastern Native North America: Creating Archaeological Models from Historical Accounts (2017)
Historical accounts and ethnographic studies of the Indians of greater southeastern North America dating from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries contain abundant information on native people’s attitudes toward black bears (Ursus americanus). These records provide a basis for inferences about changes in subsistence exploitation of bear populations in the Southeast over the last five centuries, while offering clues about longer-term non-subsistence relationships between bears and humans that...
Bears and people: from the wilderness to dancing (2017)
There has been a very strong relationship between human societies and the brown bear (Ursus arctos) in many different places and cultures. The bear has had multiple roles in European societies, from the ancient (and modern) epitome of the wild, through religious symbol to the arenas of the Roman Empire, and their later use as entertainment. At what point does the bear’s position change in society from an animal to be feared, to one to be mocked? In terms of captive management, a fully grown bear...
Beasts and Feasts in Late Medieval Ireland: The Case from Mcdermot’s Rock (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland triggered a complex swirl of changes that presage dynamics of European colonialism in modern times. One key pattern is the emergence of divides between Anglo-Norman (colonizer) and Gaelic (indigenous) identities. Negotiating differences between “being Anglo-Norman”...
The Beaver of Children and the Poor: The Social Dimension of Fur-Bearing Mammal Exploitation in Central British Columbia (2017)
The intensive Historic Period exploitation of beaver and other fur-bearing mammals, especially those that are small bodied, has typically been seen as a fur trade phenomena that can be explained in terms of optimizing returns of both material capital and prestige represented by European goods through the use of more efficient technologies introduced by Europeans. If this were strictly the case, we might expect to find a greater representation of the remains of beaver and small fur-bearers in...