Tails from the Animal Storerooms: Case Studies on the Uses and Limitations of Natural History Collections Using Multiproxy Approaches

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Natural history collections (including zooarchaeological collections) provide essential information for archaeologists. They are primarily used in identifying bones and other hard tissues, and they provide references for biomolecular and isotopic studies. Biomolecular data from these collections are increasingly the subject of historical ecological research or used to build reference libraries of molecular data. However, natural history collections are never free of issues and often have problematic taphonomic histories, especially in expansive and/or multigenerational repositories. In this paper, we present a conversation between a zooarchaeologist and molecular biologist about two case studies highlighting ways to tackle the uses and limitations of natural history collections through multiproxy approaches. First, we consider zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS) analyses of modern and archaeological rabbit specimens. This project became unexpectedly complex due to decades-old misidentifications of comparative rabbit specimens used to generate baseline ZooMS data; ultimately, we found creative ways to update the taxonomic identifications of these (mostly) rabbits. Second, we consider identifying research value in ‘oddball’ specimens collected over decades from zoos and animal breeders; these specimens, including zebras and lovebirds, can contribute to comparative studies and used as sources of genetic and molecular data not typically found in North American zooarchaeological collections.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39869.0