Rethinking Methods of Faunal Analysis

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Much progress has been made in recent years with respect to the analysis of faunal remains. Advances include improved protocols for the study of seasonality, the production of new control data on carnivore feeding behavior, as well as efforts focused on a better understanding of the process of identification and quantification of faunal specimens. However, many questions remain open or require additional research. For instance, how robust are our faunal identifications? Are NISP and MNE replicable and accurate measures of abundance? How can we explain variation in counts of cutmarks or in the identification of taphonomic agents? Do archaeozoologists produce accurate interpretations of seasonality patterns? This symposium will address these and other methodological problems that are central to the analysis of faunal remains.

Other Keywords
Zooarchaeology • Taphonomy • Faunal Analysis • ZooMS • Counting units • Paleoenvironments • Seasonality • Bison • Paleoecology • Cut Marks

Geographic Keywords
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Country) • Republic of Iraq (Country) • State of Israel (Country) • Lebanese Republic (Country) • Syrian Arab Republic (Country) • West Bank (Country) • Republic of Cyprus (Country) • Arab Republic of Egypt (Country) • Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Country) • Gaza Strip (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)
Documents
  1. Assessing differential fragmentation of mammal bone: a new proxy (2017)
  2. A Bayesian Solution to the Controversy over the Identification of Bone Surface Modification in Paleoanthropology (2017)
  3. Buck-ing the Trend: surprising species identifications of archaeological bone points using ZooMS in deer-dominated faunal assemblages (2017)
  4. Cautionary tales in the use of captive carnivore tooth mark data (2017)
  5. New on-site method to evaluate the quantity and quality of collagen in archaeological faunal assemblages using a portable FTIR and ZooMS (2017)
  6. The Number of Distinct Elements (NDE): An alternative measure of faunal abundance (2017)
  7. The promise and pitfalls of quantitative paleoenvironmental reconstruction in zooarchaeology: evaluation of late Quaternary micromammal assemblages from southern Africa (2017)
  8. Seasonal Bison Exploitation in North American Prehistory: A Probabilistic Approach Using Fetal Prey Osteometry (2017)
  9. Testing the robustness of NISP and MNE: Results of a blind test (2017)
  10. An updated GIS-based system for calculating MNE and quantifying bone surface modification frequencies and spatial location on skeletal elements in faunal assemblages (2017)
  11. What big teeth they have: Rethinking mandibular tooth crowding in domestic dogs and wolves using landmark-based metric analysis (2017)
  12. What Predicts Cut Mark Frequency and Intensity? (2017)
  13. Yikes, no comparative collection! Can 3D imaging produce robust faunal identifications? (2017)
  14. Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) and rethinking a definition of NISP (2017)