Long-Term White-Tailed Deer and Human Relationships in Parita Bay, Panama

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A long history of human groups interacting with white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) can be traced to Parita Bay in Panama. Archaeological evidence supports deer consumption since the Middle Holocene, and modern deer are continuously abundant on the Pacific side of the country where Parita Bay is located. When deer skeletal elements show evidence of a C4 plant-based diet, it is considered a good indicator that maize crops or milpas were present, thus bone and tooth carbon isotopes are useful paleoenvironmental proxies. We sampled 120 δ13C carbonate bone and 23 enamel samples to capture environmental change over a long temporal range beginning with the early hamlet agriculture period marked by the introduction of agriculture (circa 6000 BCE) at Cerro Mangote and extending into the time of Spanish contact (1521 CE) at Cerro Juan Díaz. Our results indicate that the deer relied more heavily on C4 plants, suggestive of extensive anthropogenic environmental alteration, at the beginning of agricultural introduction at Cerro Mangote than in later periods, where large agricultural villages such as Sitio Sierra and Cerro Juan Díaz have been documented. We also compared the δ13C carbonate of enamel and bone and found differences in the diet of juveniles and adults.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38787.0