Determining Regional Hunting Patterns and Possible Domestication of Turkeys in the Mesa Verde area of the American Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Strontium and oxygen analyses of archaeological bone samples are frequently used to map human mobility. In this work, these isotopic signatures are analyzed to investigate archaeofaunal material dating to 750-1280 AD in the Mesa Verde area to determine the origins of these resources. While the project contains an overall scope of analyzing rabbits, turkey, and deer, this paper focuses on the turkey bones. Baseline isotopic signatures have been determined from rodent and modern plant samples for the surrounding geologies, and the baselines provide an isotopic map for determining the provenance of turkey bones collected from select sites. These primary strontium isotope results, combined with the complementary carbon and oxygen isotope analysis geologic background data, are used to reconstruct resource acquisition and determine whether the turkeys were wild or domesticated and whether the turkeys were possibly exchanged within the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25946