Mapping Faunal Data to tDAR Ontologies to Address Data Comparability and Archaic Period Use of Animals in the Interior Eastern United States

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With support from a National Science Foundation grant, the Eastern Archaic Faunal Working Group (EAFWG) uploaded faunal datasets for 24 Archaic Period (10,000-3,000 BP) archaeological sites in the Interior Eastern United States into the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) to address research questions about the roles of cultural and environmental variability and change in human use of fauna. In order to compare the disparate faunal datasets within and among sites, we established agreed upon ontologies for variables in tDAR and then mapped our datasets to those ontologies. We used or expanded some ontologies developed by the Southwestern Faunal Working Group, and developed new ontologies to accommodate differences, such as in fauna, settlement types and contexts, cultural chronologies, and archaeological sampling and recovery in the Interior East. Mapping disparate datasets to the ontologies allowed us to assess data comparability related to bone preservation and modification, recovery methods, and site contexts and to document relative comparability within and among most sites. Mapping of faunal datasets to the resource use ontology, data integration for comparable datasets, and related analyses reveal differences and changes in resource use, particularly for aquatic resources, that we link to variability and change in cultural practices and environments.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22824