Embodied Political Ecology in Colonial Livestock: Using Tooth Enamel Serial Sampling to Understand Seasonal Herd Management in Colonial Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Isotopic and Animal aDNA Analyses in the Southwest/Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Political ecology examines the relationship between politics and the environment and how that relationship affects ecosystems. While bioarchaeologists have shown the extensive biochemical connections in human remains resulting from political and economic inequalities, less attention has been given to the ways in which animals embody political dynamics. Livestock, in particular, alter their behavior based on human activity and resource use shaped by political policies. In North America, the abundance of livestock and their ties to colonial economies make them particularly attractive to sample. In this multi-site study, I examine Spanish colonial political ecology through the embodiment of colonialism in livestock carbon and oxygen isotopic data in the Pimería Alta, today southern Arizona and northern Sonora. I used serial sampling of livestock tooth enamel to examine evidence for seasonal management of livestock species in the Sonoran Desert. My findings identified proxy evidence of how water storage and seasonal grazing management aided the production of livestock for the Spanish colonial economy at mission and presidio sites. The year-round management of herds was central to the colonial political expansion. Isotopic data offer a unique window into the mechanisms that drove herd growth and helped pave the way for colonial expansion into California.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Isotopic and Animal aDNA Analyses in the Southwest/Northwest   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36487.0