ZooMSing to Harappan Animal Husbandry: Taxonomic Identification Using Peptide Mass Fingerprinting of Indus Valley Civilization Faunal Remains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Indus Valley Civilization at its peak extended over 1 million km2 and encompassed an estimated five million people, with over 1,000 sites identified. Although faunal remains have been recovered from the excavations of approximately 100 archaeological sites, very few have been analyzed using biomolecular methods. This is largely because many of the sites have poorly preserved faunal assemblages. As Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) requires only a small amount of bone collagen, it has been successfully employed where other biomolecular methods were unsuccessful. The taxonomic resolution that ZooMS could provide is important for questions of animal management, husbandry, and exploitation including independent domestication events. Here, we applied ZooMS on faunal remains from three Indus Valley Civilization sites ranging from 7000 to 1500 BCE: Harappa, Mehrgarh, and Nausharo. We tested extraction and purification methods in order to optimize ZooMS for these sites and successfully employed ZooMS to improve taxonomic identifications of the faunal assemblages.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36604.0