Neotropical Cervids Dietary Traits as a High-Resolution Tool to Understand Past Human Subsistence Strategies

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cervids in Neotropics played a vital role in precolumbian subsistence strategies. The study of deer remains from archaeological sites, particularly their teeth, as biomarkers offers information about their behavior, environment, feeding preferences, and important events in their life history and by extension to the human groups that could benefit from hunting them. An approach to the diet study is dental wear, in particular mesowear and microwear. They provide complementary data because they present direct evidence of behavior at different time scales. Mesowear results from attrition and abrasion over a long period of time and reflects the average annual diet of an individual. While microwear, due to its high turnover rate, indicates the type of diet during the last days or weeks before an individual’s death. A few years ago, we started to study white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and brocket deer (Mazama sp.) from Panamanian archaeological sites, and we are reporting the potential of these studies. We are expanding our research to the extant animals as control samples or baselines that allow for the interpretation of the archaeological record. The aim of this presentation is to present our recent advances in this research line.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35727.0