Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan deFrance. Neeka Sewnatha. Nicolas Delsol. Robert Guralnick.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prior to Spanish colonization, the indigenous peoples of Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina) incorporated domesticated camelids (Camelidae), llamas (Lama glama), and alpacas (Vicugña pacos) into their economic and ritual life and were skillfully adept at breeding and rearing camelids for different utilitarian and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madonna Moss. Eleni Petrou. Camilla Speller. Dongya Yang. Lorenz Hauser.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alaska Natives and BC and Washington State First Nations have maintained sustainable relationships with herring over millennia. Over the past 10 years, we have been using molecular methods to study the ancient and modern DNA of Pacific herring to track changes in genetic diversity through time. Analysis of over 260 herring bones from 24...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camilla Speller. Eleni Petrou. Madonna Moss. Dongya Yang. Lorenz Hauser.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pacific herring were an abundant and important component of the coastal ecosystems of western North America for millennia; today, many populations have been decimated as a result of commercial or reduction fisheries. Focusing on genomic data, our hypothesis was that population and phenological diversity was higher in ancient herring than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geneviève Pothier-Bouchard. Julien Riel-Salvatore. Michael Buckley. Karine Taché.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) collagen fingerprinting is increasingly applied to prehistoric faunal collections—especially highly fragmented and/or altered ones—to tackle questions regarding diet, subsistence, and hunting strategies. When mass sampling archaeological bones (i.e., hundreds of bone fragments), ZooMS is a powerful...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Noe. Amber VanDerwarker. Greg Wilson. Douglas Kennett. Richard George.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study explores the relationship between garden hunting and food security in the Central Illinois River Valley, an area plagued by endemic warfare and drought during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Located ~100 km north of Cahokia, the largest precolumbian polity in North America, the CIRV was composed of smaller settlements that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Derian.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highly fragmented assemblages are challenging for zooarchaeologists. Large numbers of morphologically unidentifiable specimens are time consuming to analyze and may yield little information relevant to project goals. Faced with an assemblage of 50,000 unidentifiable specimens from the Interior Plateau of British Columbia, I employed an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianne Boileau. Kitty Emery. Ashley Sharpe. Grace Zhang. Dongya Yang.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Maya world, zooarchaeological studies have recorded regionally focused declines in animal abundances due to drying conditions and land clearance. However, zooarchaeological data alone cannot document fluctuations in animal population structure or diversity, an insight that can be provided by ancient DNA analysis. In this study, we use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Iride Tomazic. Amy Nicodemus. John O'Shea.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the past archaeology rarely played a role in the discussion of anthropogenic pollution. This lack of study is mainly due to the skepticism around the accurate representation of heavy metals in archaeological material as a result of diagenetic processes. In this study, we present preliminary results of a systematic selection of animal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Freiwald. Christina Halperin. Camille Dubois-Francoeur. Jacob Harris.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bone tool workshops are rare in Mesoamerica, but both finished products and debitage suggest that human bones (includes images) were used alongside whitetail deer, turkey, and other species to produce tools such as needles and awls, as well as ornaments. The debris of Late Classic bone production was recovered from the Maya site of Ucanal,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Martínez-Polanco. Florent Rivals.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cervids in Neotropics played a vital role in precolumbian subsistence strategies. The study of deer remains from archaeological sites, particularly their teeth, as biomarkers offers information about their behavior, environment, feeding preferences, and important events in their life history and by extension to the human groups that could...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz. Jacob Holland-Lulewicz.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeological datasets are often large, complex, and difficult to visualize and communicate. Many visual aids and summaries often limit the patterns that can be identified and our interpretations of relationships between contexts, species, and environmental information. The most commonly used of these often include bar charts, pie charts,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miranda George. Elizabeth Paris. Roberto López Bravo.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The utilization of dental morphology for the identification of different dog breeds in archaeological contexts has recently emerged as a promising new avenue for zooarchaeological methodologies, particularly in cases differentiating between coated and hairless breeds. Recent zooarchaeological studies from the Early Postclassic period (ca. AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Plew. Louisa Daggers.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Guyana’s shell midden complex, which stretches across its northwestern coast, documents more than 7,500 years of human land use. Traditional interpretations of the middens have assumed a degree of environmental constancy save for fluctuating Holocene sea levels associated with species found in marine and brackish waters. This study provides a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Gilmore. Jonathan Dombrosky. Lisa Nagaoka. Steve Wolverton.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Taxonomic identification is a key goal of faunal analysis, but few controls are in place to ensure data quality. Comparative collections and identification guides offer valuable information; however, the validity of faunal identification can be questioned without assessing each feature’s utility for differentiating taxa. Analysis of biometric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Miszaniec. Paul Szpak. John Darwent. Christyann Darwent.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Saffron cod (Eleginus gracilis) are small nearshore fish distributed throughout the Pacific and Arctic oceans and were a staple to preindustrial Indigenous fisheries of Western Alaska. Fish, mammal, and bird-bone were sampled for carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes from sites in Norton Sound, Alaska, spanning 2500 BCE–1850 CE. Comparing our...