The Diet of Dogs: Dental Microwear Texture Analysis to Interpret the Human-Canine Connection in Prehistoric North America

Summary

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 Villages, and in the foothills of the Rockies during the Late Prehistoric period. I employ Dental Microwear Texture Analysis (DMTA) to examine human-canine connections and dog feeding/provisioning strategies. Analyzing the diets of domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) provides a proxy for human intentions to sustain canine companions. Baseline data from members of the Family Canidae provides comparative microwear textures and a more contextualized insight into the dietary behavior of dogs that lived with humans in geographically and culturally distinct areas of North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21375