Exploring Early Historic Human-Canid Relationships in the Intermountain West: A Case Study from Seventeenth-Century Blacks Fork, Wyoming

Summary

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

Relationships among people, dogs, and wild canid taxa played important cultural and functional roles in the early Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. However, the complexity of human-canid relationships in precolonial America and morphological similarities among wild and domestic canids make tracing human-canid interaction through the archaeological record challenging. The Blacks Fork, WY, site dates to the mid-seventeenth century, and includes a juvenile domestic horse in association with three canid skulls displaying morphological features of both dogs and coyotes. To identify these canids’ species and explore their possible relationships with humans, I applied a range of techniques from the archaeological and bio-molecular sciences, including osteological study and mtDNA sequencing. Results suggest the Blacks Fork canids were coyotes interacting minimally with humans beyond their death and butchery. Comparing the Blacks Fork canids with canid remains from sites across western America suggests archaeological coyotes exhibit distinct treatments from archaeological dog remains in Native archaeological contexts, and that the interment of the coyotes at Blacks Fork likely served ceremonial purposes. The Blacks Fork canids underscore the cultural significance of coyotes in the intermountain West and illuminate the intersection of new and existing systems of human-animal relationships during the introduction of domestic horses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36715.0