Spatiotemporal Analysis of Regional and Sub-regional Dog Size Data in Pre-Columbian North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent genetic research (Lethlohair et al. 2018) showed that dogs were introduced into North America over as many as four migration events. The first two were by Native Americans and the third and fourth by Europeans. In light of these findings, our research seeks to describe and explain the regional and sub-regional patterning in the sizes of domesticated dogs in Pre-Columbian North America. To do this, we use a dataset of dog skeletal data from archaeological sites across the continent. Initial coarse-grained spatial analysis has shown significant variation in dog body size between regions where dogs were used as a source of labor (e.g., the Intermountain West and Plains) and those where they were not (the Great Basin and Southeast). Our work builds upon this research, and examines variation in dog size on multiple geographic scales and through time to describe trends in animal management. We offer explanations for these patterns using a combination of the recent genetic data, archaeological data, and ethnohistoric information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23417