Vertebrate Faunal Assemblages and Bone Tool Use in the Early Agricultural Period

Summary

Researchers have recovered large faunal assemblages containing several hundred bone artifacts at Las Capas, a San Pedro phase site in Tucson, Arizona. Artifacts include utilitarian and non-utilitarian objects with a variety of technical and symbolic uses. Excavations at Los Pozos, a large Cienega phase site in the Tucson Basin, yielded a very large collection of animal bone with a rich bone artifact assemblage. Bone technologies were often used to make items from plant fibers, wood, animal hides, or other perishable materials. These less durable artifacts often decay and disappear from archaeological sites, but the bone tools remain. The collected assemblages provide exceptional information not only on the extent to which pre-ceramic era peoples relied on bone, but clues to other activities and the availability of resources. Comparisons between the two assemblages show many similarities in the animal taxa used for bone tools. However, there are important differences that reflect variability in the use of available resources and economy of manufacture through time. The correspondence between the bone tool assemblage and the greater faunal assemblage at large provides insights into life in the floodplain during the Early Agricultural period in southern Arizona.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Multidisciplinary Studies of Anthropogenic Change, Subsistence, Social Organization, Regional Interaction, and Technology at the Las Capas Site, BC 1200-400, Southern Arizona

Keywords

Spatial Coverage