Society for American Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Breeanna Charolla. Jamie Hodgkins.

Italy serves as a critically important region for better understanding the late Pleistocene as it was home to Neandertals and other hominins. Archaeological excavation in northwestern Italy at the cave site of Arma Veirana, with layers dating back to 44 ka, intends to provide insight into this ambiguous period in prehistory. Preliminary data from zooarchaeological analysis of 1,414 specimens indicate that Neandertals primarily hunted medium-sized bovid/cervids, including Capra ibex, Cervus...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Simeonoff. Curtis Marean. Jamie Hodgkins.

Understanding if and to what extent early anatomically modern humans adapted to dramatic climatic events is essential to human origins research. Pinnacle Point — a complex of cave sites and rockshelters along the southern coast of South Africa — offers a unique opportunity to study human adaptability through time. The long sequence at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 (PP5-6) spans 164 - 44 thousand years ago and encompasses two Interglacial to Glacial Marine Isotope Stage transitions (Stages 5-4-3)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelia Jansen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The current accumulation of archaeological investigations at far-north Alaskan Goldrush sites either completely lack or severely underrepresent the zooarchaeological components at these sites. This data is vital and adds context to past and future archaeological investigations by enabling more accurate and inclusive interpretations of life in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Wisner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster provides an analysis of faunal materials from mixed deposits in both the Caves Branch Rockshelter (CBR) and Sapodilla Rockshelter (SDR) in Central Belize. This analysis continues previous research at the two sites from contexts spanning the Protoclassic to Terminal Classic temporal periods concerning ancient Maya ritual and mortuary behaviors. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Becenti.

This is an abstract from the "Nat’aah Nahane’ Bina’ji O’hoo’ah: Diné Archaeologists & Navajo Archaeology in the 21st Century" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout history, the Diné have worked to manage the arrival of new people, ideas, and resources into their communities. Following the introduction of Old World domesticates to northwestern New Mexico during the Gobernador phase (c. 1700-1775), Diné groups increasingly incorporated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Nowakowski. Chrissina C. Burke. Caitlin M. H. Bishop.

This presentation provides an update on prehistoric Southwest dog pathologies from the Museum of Northern Arizona’s curated faunal collections. Our zooarchaeological analysis of healed cranial lesions and tooth wear has not only expanded on earlier research accomplished in previous years but it has redefined the prehistoric dog’s role in the agricultural Southwest. Typically, domesticated dogs are identified as beasts of burden, which has inhibited sufficient and further analysis of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Escee Lopez. Jessica Morales. Rene Vellanoweth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological evidence from the California Channel Islands has provided insight on the important role fish played in daily human subsistence practices. San Nicolas Island is home to a rich and diverse marine environment containing the largest kelp forest along the Southern California Bight. This study focuses on fish data from a middle to late Holocene...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Klemmer.

The Rio Chico site was occupied almost continuously for 5000 years (ca. 3500 B.C.E. to 1532 C.E.) in a region of coastal South America that is heavily influenced by climatic events such as El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Evidence suggests that occupants of Rio Chico were heavily dependent on marine resources. The fishing strategies utilized at Rio Chico sustained the community over time, which allowed for the long-term development of an economy based on the Spondylus trade. This combination...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Bobolinski.

Housepit 54 at the Bridge River pithouse village in south-central British Columbia provides a glimpse into the complex cultural practices that occurred at this area in the past. This village, which includes approximately 80 semi-subterranean structures, was occupied during four periods, approximately 1800-1600 cal. B.P. (BR 1), 1600-1300 cal. B.P. (BR 2), 1300-1000 cal. B.P. (BR 3), and 610-45 cal. B.P (BR 4), firmly placing the site within both a historic and a pre-Colonial context. It is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yue Li. Yaopeng Qian. Honghai Chen. Zhen Wang. Haifeng Dou.

This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research analyzed animal remains of the late Pre-Zhou culture from two sites of Zaoshugounao and Zaolinhetan in present-day central Shaanxi Province in China. The comparison of wild and domestic animal taxa, age profiles for main domestic animals, and sources and types of bone artifacts suggest distinct patterns of animal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Benedict.

This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Faunal subsistence practices remain understudied throughout the Mimbres region, even as the general pattern of large-mammal resource reduction through time is known. This poster documents the faunal subsistence practices at Lake Roberts Vista (LRV), a Mimbres site occupied during the Late Pithouse (LPH) and Classic Mimbres (CM) periods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah MacDonald.

This paper discusses zooarchaeological analysis conducted at Elden Pueblo in Northern Arizona. As one of the last remaining Sinagua occupation sites in the San Francisco Peaks region, the site’s abandonment during a cool and dry period suggests that the occupants may have left the area because of resource shortages. I hypothesize that populations must change acquisition and processing strategies in order to adapt to these shortages. Evidence of subsistence stress over time appears in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Sanchez.

This is an abstract from the "Current Insights into Pyrodiversity and Seascape Management on the Central California Coast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent indigenous, eco-archaeological, and low-impact field research on the Central California Coast resulted in the excavation of four sites that were inhabited from the mid-Holocene to the contact period. Vertebrate remains from these sites were sampled using fine-grained recovery methods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peng Lyu. Katherine Brunson. Jing Yuan. Zhipeng Li.

This paper reviews current evidence for the origins of domestic cattle in China. We describe two possible scenarios: 1) domestic cattle were domesticated indigenously in East Asia from the wild aurochs (Bos primigenius), and 2) domestic cattle were domesticated elsewhere and then introduced to China. We conclude that the current zooarchaeological and genetic evidence does not support indigenous domestication within China, although it is possible that people experimented with managing wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Larson.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human societies do not operate as a stagnated phenomenon but instead experience stacked cycles of adaptation, resilience, and possibly collapse. Identifying and teasing these cycles in the archaeological record can be difficult and have often been applied to hunter-gatherer case studies. This research attempts to apply an adaptive cycling model...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Ryan Jr..

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological data is often looked at for what it can tell archaeologists about those utilizing the specimens in the past. However, these specimens (data) provided information to those utilizing the fauna themselves. In the maritime environment, the information transmitted by the fauna extracted was often one of the only sources of information available to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Corl.

Cottonwood Spring Pueblo (LA 175), an El Paso Phase (A.D. 1275-1450) horticultural village in southern New Mexico is one of the largest pueblos in the region. Understanding what animal communities were included in the subsistence strategies people living in this village used will aid in understanding strategies that people relied upon to support a large population in the Northern Chihuahuan Desert. Were prey animals (such as desert cottontails, black-tailed jackrabbits, whitetail deer, mule...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Corl.

This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Harris Site (LA 1867) is a Late Pithouse period (AD 550–1000) agricultural village located along the upper Mimbres River Valley in New Mexico. This period is seen as a time of great demographic and social change linked to changes in the environment. This site provides an excellent case study looking at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Kinney. Erin Kennedy Thornton.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of a broad zooarchaeological analysis conducted on remains recovered from a variety of contexts at the ancient Maya community of Aventura (Corozal, Belize). Because this is the first analysis of faunal remains from Aventura, it provides valuable information about life in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharlene ODonnell.

Many indigenous and non-indigenous communities throughout the world depend on coastal and riverine environments for their livelihood and subsistence. The seascape is a setting of daily activities, and these communities have a detailed knowledge of their surrounding environment, the tides, and the seasons, all of which influence their decisions for catchment locations of habitat-specific faunal assemblages. For this paper, ethnographic research, zooarchaeology, biological salinity tolerances, GIS...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Azevedo. David Byers.

This poster presents an analysis of archaeofaunal fish remains from Bluefields Bay, Jamaica and findings of resource depression from the Caribbean. The Jamaican collection derives from recent excavations of a shell midden in Belmont, encompassed by the Bluefields Bay marine sanctuary. Preliminary radiocarbon results suggest the site dates to the late Taino occupation of Jamaica known as Meillacan Ostionoid (900-1500 AD). The Jamaican collection contains over 17,000 bones, with 8,961 specimens...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve Pothier Bouchard. Fabio Negrino. Julien Riel-Salvatore. Pascale Tremblay.

Human-environmental interactions can be discussed on different scales, and from diverse perspectives and specializations in archaeology. We propose to examine human mobility on the local scale of Riparo Bombrini, a key site in Northwest Italy to understand Anatomically Modern Human dispersals along the Mediterranean coast during the early Upper Paleolithic. Previous studies including spatial, lithic, and raw material data revealed distinct mobility signatures from the site’s two Protoaurignacian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Siavash Samei. Deborah Olszewski. Natalie Munro.

Economic decisions of Late Pleistocene foragers bore heavily on the nature, timing, and intensity of the adoption of agriculture in different parts of Eurasia. Decades of intensive research in the Levant and Anatolia have made significant contributions to our understanding of Late Pleistocene economic strategies in the western parts of the Near East. A recent surge of interest by Iranian researchers and internationally collaborative teams in Paleolithic archaeology of Iran has renewed attention...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandi Bethke.

This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of the faunal assemblage recovered from excavations at the Cut Bank Creek Boarding School Site (24GL0302), located on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Glacier County, MT. Excavations at the site took place following the inadvertent discovery of a large bone bed initially unearth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Bruck. Todd J. Braje. Torben C. Rick. Emma Elliott Smith. Lain Graham.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the southern California coast, Point Conception is highly significant for Chumash peoples and demarcates a critical location of ecological diversity. At this location, the coastline abruptly shifts from a north-south to east-west trending shoreline and marks the ecological convergence of colder northern and warmer southern waters, a biogeographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Munley. Michelle LeFebvre.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological baselines of human-animal engagements and their outcomes are increasingly critical to modeling what community stability looked like in the past and what we can learn from it today. Concomitantly, zooarchaeological baselines also provide critical measures of biodiversity distribution, loss, or persistence through time for use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn Bishop.

This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the earliest recovery of their remains in the 1890s, the parrots of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, have featured prominently in discussions of Chacoan trade, social complexity, ceremonial organization, and symbolism and ritual. Despite their prominence in interpretations of the canyon’s primary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nayeli Jiménez-Cano.

Large bodies of water surround the Maya Area and its ancients inhabitants had close subsistence relations with the aquatic world by exploiting the resources that the this scenario provided them. In this sense, fishes were one of the animals widely exploited by the ancient Maya and whose zooarchaeological study helps to uncover questions and pose new queries about their social and environmental uses. This paper gathers information about the archaeological presence of such resources from various...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Kamenov. Michelle LeFebvre. Susan deFrance. Geoff DuChemin. John Krigbaum.

Although the Bahamas are not geologically part of the Caribbean, they are culturally associated with the rest of the Caribbean Islands. Due to their unique geology the Bahamas can potentially be a distinct Pb and Sr isotopic province when compared to the rest of the Caribbean islands. Here we present the results of isotopic analysis of archaeological Bahamian hutia specimens from two pre-Columbian sites on Crooked Island (Crooked Island-8 and Crooked Island 14) located in the Bahamas, and one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dale Earl. David Reynolds.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2008, during geoarchaeological survey of a portion of Tijeras Arroyo located on Kirtland Air Force Base, researchers located remains of bison in four new locations. This includes a Bison occidentalis skull which was found in soils that were dated to 5600 to 5700 BP. Using techniques from zooarchaeology these remains are aiding archaeologists and natural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rani Alexander. Jocelyn Valadez.

This is an abstract from the "Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present an initial analysis of zooarchaeological remains recovered from 2022 field season of the NMSU Archaeological Field School, directed by Dr. Kelly Jenks, for the ancestral frontier settlement of San Miguel de Carnué, occupied 1763–1771 by the Cañón de Carnué Land Grant Community in the East Mountains of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven James.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late 1930s, a Works Progress Administration (WPA) crew under the direction of Albert H. Schroeder excavated Trash Mound No. 1, a Preclassic Colonial period deposit (A.D. 775-950) at the extensive Hohokam site of Pueblo Grande along the Salt River in Phoenix, Arizona. This material remained largely unanalyzed at the Pueblo Grande Museum and results of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yayi Wang. Quanjia Chen. Chunxue Wang.

Lower Xiajiadian Culture is an early Bronze Age archaeological culture (4,000 BP) in Northern China, located at western Liaoning and southeastern Inner Mongolia. This study explores two different kinds of oracle bones from this cultural period: (1) made of cattle scapular was thought to have been burnt in divination and (2) bone of a mid- to large-sized mammal hoof,thrown during divination. The latter has been scarcely mentioned in the previous research and has not usually been treated as an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Wolfhagen.

Archaeologists investigate past hunting and herding strategies using models of animal survivorship derived from long bone fusion and/or mandibular tooth wear patterns. As biological and behavioral variation makes estimating precise biological ages problematic, researchers typically assign "age stages" that describe ranked age groups. Ordered logistic regression models take advantage of the information in these rankings to estimate and analyze patterns in ranked/ordered data based on other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Hsu. Nawa Sugiyama. Leila Martinez-Bentley. Mónica Gómez Peña.

Preliminary analyses of the zooarchaeological assemblage from the Plaza of the Columns Complex illustrate a snapshot into past human activities such as specialized ceremonial events and faunal acquisition strategies for food consumption. The fauna from this complex, located just northwest of the Sun Pyramid, add to the database of forty years of archaeofaunal exploration throughout Teotihuacan. Here, we focus upon animal species distributed among four areas to understand the economic and ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Brandl. Teresa Steele.

Investigating the socioeconomic status of occupants in 19th century historical sites has long been a goal of archaeological investigations; more recently, analyses of the animal bones preserved in these sites (zooarchaeology) have been used to compliment conclusions drawn from other lines of evidence. Following in this tradition, we will use faunal remains to examine changes in socioeconomic status of the inhabitants of the Stanford Mansion in Sacramento, California. The Stanford Mansion was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle LeFebvre. Susan deFrance. George Kamenov. William Keegan. John Krigbaum.

Bahamian hutia (Geocapromys ingrahami) are small sized rodents endemic to the Bahamas. Fossil and subfossil records indicate broad geographic distribution of the rodent across the Bahamas in the past, while today Bahamian hutia naturally occur on one island. Bahamian hutia have received little attention archaeologically resulting in critical gaps in our understanding of both natural and anthropogenic patterns in Bahamian hutia distribution and life history. In conjunction with "traditional"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Polly Burnette-Egan.

This poster presentation presents a reanalysis of legacy faunal material, collected by Henry Wright and the zooarchaeological analysis conducted by Richard Redding, during the 1968 excavation on the Deh Luran Plains in southeastern Iran at the 4th-millennium site Tepe Farukhabad. It behooves all researchers to give more attention to the existing data sets already collected and available for research. In that vein, this study re-evaluates the faunal data sets at Tepe Farkuhabad and looks for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Crater Gershtein. Reuven Yeshurun. Yossi Zaidner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Levantine Middle Paleolithic period plays a crucial role in human origins research, encompassing vast cognitive and technological developments. Faunal remains are an important source of knowledge regarding hunting patterns, reflecting both human behavior and subsistence strategies. This paper addresses questions of hunting, transport, butchery patterns and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Wilcox Black.

The study of animal remains from archaeological sites has proven to be an invaluable approach to understanding past social, economic, and political practices. Despite the diverse behaviors and sets of relationships animal remains can index, faunal analysis has been an underutilized approach to studying Indian history and prehistory. In this paper, I present new research and zooarchaeological data to demonstrate how human-animal engagements changed throughout the Neolithic (3000-1200 BCE), Iron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Buckley.

Biomolecular methods can vastly improve the confidence in species determination of animal bone in a manner that, unlike traditional morphology-based methods, is not subject to the skills of the analyst. Until recently these have largely focussed on ancient DNA-based approaches, and so have been at costs too great to become widely used for most archaeofaunal assemblages despite being available for more than thirty years. However, within the last decade I have pioneered the development of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Taylor. Tumurbaatar Tuvshinjargal. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Julia Clark.

Identifying the timing and nature of the emergence of pastoral societies in eastern Central Asia is hampered by many key logistical challenges, including the scarcity of early nomadic habitation sites and the small and fragmented nature of related archaeofaunal assemblages. This study presents faunal identifications of animal bones from two recently discovered Bronze Age habitation sites in northern and western Mongolia using ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry)- a technique that uses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Landry.

The greater Sinagua region spans a distinct convergent geographical and cultural setting which provides a range of resources. Ridge Ruin is a prominent Sinaguan site occupied during the transition from the Pueblo II to Pueblo III period. In 1941, John MacGregor published a bulletin summarizing the results of his Winona Village and Ridge Ruin excavations. In MacGregor’s report and in the few publications on Ridge Ruin since, the majority of research has concentrated on the famous burial of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Merrick. Tanya Peres.

The purpose of this research is to examine different domestic activities at the Mound Field site (8Wa8), a Weeden Island shell ring in Wakulla County, Florida. Zooarchaeological analysis was conducted on the faunal remains recovered in 2016 from six excavation units at Mound Field. These units represent different hypothesized areas of domestic activities from across the site. The differential deposition of food remains may reveal more about the patterns of activities in which people...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curran Fitzgerald.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Intermediate Period (LIP; ca. 1000CE-1450CE) site of Las Peñas is located in the sierra of the upper Torata valley in southern Peru. Laboratory analyses of faunal remains recovered during the 2016 excavation of households at Las Peñas provide insight into domestic life during the LIP, as well as environmental and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Opishinski.

Identity is a complex entity that is constantly being remade and altered, so to understand the development of the New Mexican identity in the 17th century, one must understand the various parts that make up an identity. This poster examines one of these parts: the foodways of New Mexico. Specifically, this project is examining the faunal deposits from LA 20,000, the largest Spanish estancia in early colonial New Mexico (1598-1680). The meat-component of the diet from a 17th century Spanish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Fridberg.

The tropical lowland surroundings of La Corona support a wide range of indigenous fauna. Zooarchaeological analysis demonstrates that the site’s ancient inhabitants made use of this diversity, exploiting many terrestrial and aquatic taxa in subsistence and ritual activity. This paper summarizes major zooarchaeological findings from the duration of the La Corona Regional Archaeological Project. Excavations at La Corona have not targeted areas expected to be "fauna rich" and have produced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Cesario.

The settlement of Iceland, a previously uninhabited landscape, began a series of human-induced environmental changes that have had lasting effects on not just the land but on social organization as well. As land claims were made for household farms, hierarchy developed and some were pushed to settle on the margins. In Hegranes, a region in Skagafjörður, northern Iceland, the sites that are on the margins are often much smaller than the others and may not have been farms at all but rather...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Wisner. Katie K. Tappan. Aimee I. Alvarado. Chrissina C. Burke.

Zooarchaeological data provides details on the social processes related to ritual artifact deposits in the Maya area. This poster provides the results of faunal analysis on materials collected during the 2016 and 2017 Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance project excavations of Group B at the site of Xunantunich. Our excavations focused on structures B1, B2, and B4, where multiple, and often layered, deposits of artifacts were located outside of the structures. Data collected includes,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Cannarozzi.

This is an abstract from the "To Move Forward We Must Look Back: The Slave Wrecks Project at 10 Years" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Christiansted National Historic Site, located in the town of Christiansted on St Croix, US Virgin Islands, was a Danish military compound that served as a major trading hub dealing in the trade of enslaved Africans. As such, the compound was home to both Danish soldiers and the enslaved Africans on whom they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raija Heikkila. Kaitlyn Laws. Thomas Hardy.

Minaspata, a site located in the Cuzco Valley of the south-central Peruvian Andes, contains evidence of occupation spanning continuously from the Early Horizon through the end of the Inca Empire. In 2013, several units were excavated in order to better understand the social transformations which occurred in local populations due to colonial practices, both under the Wari state in the Middle Horizon and in the early consolidation of the Inca heartland. Analysis of the faunal remains of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey DuChemin.

This paper presents the results of a recent zooarchaeological analysis of vertebrate remains from the Tibes Ceremonial Center near Ponce, Puerto Rico. Two excavation units contained intact and undisturbed deposits with the potential to provide information pertaining to social dynamics and socio-cultural change at the site. Radiocarbon dates from the two units indicate that each archaeological deposit occurred during times of perceived dynamic social and cultural activities on the island. During...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Irvy Quitmyer. Nicole Cannarrozzi. Margo Schwadron. Douglas Jones.

Zooarchaeological research in the central Georgia Bight has arrived at a point where human subsistence behavior over space and time can be modeled. Elizabeth J. Reitz and colleagues have offered a testable hypothesis that subsistence rested on three cultural and ecological pillars: continuity, flexibility and resilience. For nearly 5000 years, and possibly longer, resilient estuarine finfish taxa that easily recover from intensive harvest were most frequently exploited, while terrestrial and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Hambrecht.

Anthropogenic climate change will both aggravate existing and create new situations in which local communities encounter the power of larger networks looking to either exploit or manage resources in their area. This paper will discuss a variety of ways in which zooarchaeological data investigated in a historical ecological mode might be useful in such circumstances. Zooarchaeology creates a deep context for human and animal dynamics. It investigates anthropogenic as well as environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jarod Hutson. Anna K. Behrensmeyer. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez. Gary Haynes. Amanda Millhouse.

Taphonomy, the study of how organisms fossilize and information that is lost and gained along the way, has emerged as pivotal to reconstructing the paleoecology of animal communities and ancient human lifeways. Through taphonomic analysis, we can decipher the sources of bone accumulations at paleontological and archaeological sites and the processes involved in bone modification and preservation. Such inquiries rely upon well-documented reference collections that link certain bone modifications...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Rapes. Jesse Wolfhagen. Max Price. Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

Zooarchaeologists contribute valuable data to the exploration of archaeology’s grand challenges. The scale and complexity of these problems requires zooarchaeologists to aggregate and analyze data using rigorous statistical methods while ensuring reproducibility and validity. Because assemblages can contain thousands of data points, conducting statistical analyses on all of the available data in a standardized fashion is difficult. ZooaRchGUI provides zooarchaeologists a free, user-friendly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Rapes. Jesse Wolfhagen. Max Price. Erik Otárola-Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of zooarchaeological data illuminates some of the most important and challenging questions in archaeology. Statistical and other quantitative methods are frequently employed to address these questions by evaluating hypotheses with empirical evidence. Such methodologies range from standard "statistical tests" to novel,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kitty Emery. Rob Guralnick. Michelle LeFebvre. Laura Brenskelle. Sarah Whitcher Kansa.

Re-use of large zooarchaeological datasets offers new ways of tackling the grand challenges of archaeological science. But big-data research requires integrating multiple zooarchaeological datasets while maintaining the biological and archaeological details needed to contextualize the faunal information. Accessing and combining these data remains difficult despite the increasing use of open-access archaeological data publishers and archiving services, and the open-access, interoperable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estelle Praet. Kitty Emery. Elizabeth Graham. Norbert Stanchly. Michael Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mammals are an essential part of the jungle world surrounding the Maya, both for their cosmovision and subsistence. Their identification in the archaeological record is essential to understand their complex role. This work, as a proof of concept, tested the application of Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) in Maya sites of Lamanai and Marco Gonzalez...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Denia Berenice Villanueva Ruiz.

From the beginning, man has always tried to understand nature. Mostly because their survival depended on it, the Prehispanic societies conceived it as one of their best allies. The perception of animals was always influenced by the mysticism and the belief that every living thing belonged to an order, which at the same time harmonized a universal context. Tamtoc, was not the exception. Along all the excavations that had been performed, various distinct representations of zoomorphic figurines...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Hayward. Frank Schieppati. Michael Cinquino.

While Caribbean rock art is characterized by its high percentage of human-like facial and body images, realistically-depicted and stylized zoomorphic motifs are also present. Fish, turtles, birds and marine mammals are among the animals found amidst anthropomorphic, geometric and abstract designs. We identify a number of zoomorphic forms and describe their distributional patterns from our current set of rock art sites particularly Puerto Rico. We also discuss the roles or functions these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Malone. Gerald Schroedl. Anneke Janzen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The bone button industry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at Brimstone Hill Fortress on the eastern Caribbean island of St. Kitts is well documented. Here, British soldiers and enslaved Africans manufactured single-hole bone disks that likely served as cores for cloth covered buttons. Tens of thousands of these disks and removals have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Buckley.

The interdisciplinary nature of the tools and techniques available to the bioarchaeologist ranges across the sciences. Most recently, the field of proteomics within analytical chemistry, has been utilised to develop methods of species identification of archaeological materials in a technique that we have been calling ZooMS, short for Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry. This methodology was initially created for separation of common domesticate vertebrates, but recent years have seen the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sebastian Millien. Kristine Korzow Richter. Richard Meadow. Christina Warinner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Indus Valley Civilization at its peak extended over 1 million km2 and encompassed an estimated five million people, with over 1,000 sites identified. Although faunal remains have been recovered from the excavations of approximately 100 archaeological sites, very few have been analyzed using biomolecular methods. This is largely because many of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Spears. Kurt Dongoske. Maren Hopkins. T. J. Ferguson.

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The federal historic preservation program of the United States is built on a framework that privileges Western epistemologies of time and space and perceives historic properties as inanimate and valuable for their scientific potential. The concept of historic...