Scarlet Macaws and Place Making in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For over a thousand years, people living in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest (SW/NW) acquired, raised, and kept nonlocal scarlet macaws (Ara macao). Although they are endemic to the neotropics of southern and eastern Mexico and Central and South America, people transported these birds over thousands of kilometers and raised them at settlements throughout the SW/NW, feeding them maize and other resources grown and procured for human consumption, and treating them like ancestors upon their deaths. In this paper, I argue that this breadth of human-animal interactions had novel and transformative impacts that extended beyond aviculture and contributed to place making in the daily lives of past people. I take a holistic approach—considering zooarchaeology, biogeochemical methods, contextual archaeological approaches, and Indigenous histories—to examine the enduring impacts of long-term human-macaw interactions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37260.0