Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
276-300 (1,173 Records)
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 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....
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...
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...
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....
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 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 War: A Bronze Age Initiation Ritual in the Russian Steppes (2018)
At the Srubnaya-culture settlement of Krasnosamarskoe in the Russian steppes, dated 1900–1700 BCE, a ritual occurred in which the participants consumed sacrificed dogs, primarily, and a few wolves, violating normal food practices found at other sites, during the winter. At least 64 winter-killed canids, 19% MNI/37% NISP, were roasted, fileted, and apparently were eaten. More than 99% were dogs. Their heads were chopped into small standardized segments with practiced blows of an axe on multiple...