Body Mass Estimates of Dogs in North America by Geography, Time, and Human Cultural Associations

Summary

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

Dogs of North America share a long history of interaction with humans, yet little is known about how humans managed their dogs prior to modern breeding practices that became popular during the sixteenth century. European colonists recognized a few indigenous dog “breeds” and described these dogs as primarily “wolf-like” in appearance and phenotypically variable in body size. In order to evaluate the claims that several discrete sizes of dogs existed prior to European colonization, we measured dog skeletal material recovered from archaeological sites in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. We focused on specimens with known cultural associations that are well-accepted within the field of archaeology. Combined with publicly available data, we estimated dog body mass by inputting the values for each measurement into a regression equation generated from modern dog data. Our analysis shows that multiple dog body masses existed in North America, and we further explore this variation by comparing body mass estimates by time period, geography, and human cultural association. This work contextualizes these results within the broader theoretical scholarship that proposes that dogs as proxies for past human migration and other behaviors.

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): 37326.0