White-tailed Deer Management in the Archaeofaunal Record of Parita Bay and the Sabana de Bogotá

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Management refers to "the manipulation of the conditions of growth of an organism or the environment that sustains it, in order to increase its relative abundance and predictability, and to reduce the time and energy required to harvest it." This process is one of the preliminary steps before domestication. The white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus Zimmermann 1780) serves as an optimal proxy for documenting the spectrum of human-animal interactions, ranging from wild encounters to garden raiding and direct taming. White-tailed deer possess numerous characteristics that make them ideal candidates for management. For instance, their size ranks them among the largest mammals in the Neotropics. These adaptable animals thrive in various habitats and environments, from deserts to tropical forests, largely due to their flexible diets. The aim of this presentation is to discuss the zooarchaeological and taphonomic analyses of two preceramic contemporaneous assemblages of white-tailed deer from Cerro Mangote (Parita Bay, Panama) and Aguazuque (Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia). The study provides evidence of deer population management practices, including the selective hunting of adult individuals of both sexes and the targeting of older deer.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51303