Mesoamerican Cowboys: Exploring the History of Cattle Ranching in Colonial Mexico and Guatemala through Zooarchaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The introduction of cattle soon after the Spanish invasion had numerous and dramatic consequences over the society in New Spain. The historical scholarship on this topic emphasizes the prominent role of cattle ranching, which found its most iconic development in the great central Mexican haciendas that emerged over the sixteenth century and that contributed to shaping the Mesoamerican colonial landscape. The development of ranching practices corresponds to what some authors have coined a “frontier economy” that often emerged in European colonial contexts. Open-range ranching, which can be defined as the free placement of ruminants on large areas of land with the intent to sell the animals as commodities on the market, certainly had consequences not only over the management of the land but also on the organization of labor. Despite these historical accounts, what remains unclear is how widespread were these husbandry practices and what were the biological consequences on the animals themselves. To explore this little-known dimension of Spanish colonialism in Mesoamerica, I propose here to model this mode of husbandry following a set of tests based on traditional zooarchaeological tools such as osteometrics, cull profiles, and pathological markers applied to faunal assemblages from Mexico and Guatemala.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Animal Bones to Human Behavior   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32145