Unlikely Allies: Modern Wolves and the Diets of Pre-contact Domestic Dogs

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Assumptions of prehistoric domestic dogs as scavengers has been pervasive in archaeology and beyond. This project clarifies these assumption by investigating the dietary behavior of prehistoric domestic dogs via dental microwear data or features on the tooth surface that indicate types of food consumed. In order to understand the array of possible domestic dog dietary behavior, I compare their diets to their unmodified wild progenitor, the grey wolf. The use of three-dimensional tooth surface data coupled with scale sensitive fractal analysis allows for an unbiased interpretation of these surfaces. A robust baseline of wolf dietary behavior via their microwear has been collected from a large collection of modern wolves housed at the Draper Natural History Museum. Curated domestic dogs from archaeological sites located on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountain foothills are evaluated to interpret feeding practices employed by their human caregivers to contribute to a better understanding of human-to-canine provisioning strategies in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• New and Ongoing Research on the North American Plains and Rocky Mountains

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23726