Exploring early historic human-canid relationships in the intermountain west: a case study from 17th century Blacks Fork, WY

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Between the 16th and 17th century, Indigenous cultures of North America began utilizing domestic animals brought to the Americas by Spanish colonists, creating profound social, cultural, and ecological change. In the northern Rocky Mountains, domestic horses provided new opportunities for transport and travel—but our understanding of how new human-horse relationships articulated with pre-existing human-animal relationships is still limited. Blacks Fork, WY, is uniquely suited to provide more archaeological insight, as it features the 17th century deposition of an Indigenous domestic horse skeleton with three, morphologically ambiguous, canid skulls. To explore human-canid relationships at Blacks Fork, and their possible associations with human-horse relationships, we used mitochondrial DNA extraction and analysis, craniometric examination, and paleopathological examination to identify species, age, health, and relevant trauma for each of the canid specimens. Our results suggest that the Blacks Fork canids were likely three healthy, young adult, wild coyotes or coyote-dog hybrids, which people hunted, killed, and disarticulated for ritual deposition at Blacks Fork. Our findings provide archaeological evidence for the antiquity of human-coyote relationship in the rockies and reveal information about the shifting roles of wild and domestic animals during a time of rapid transformation in the North American west.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41707.0