Examining Preservation in Rockshelters: The Reanalysis of Woodruff Cave

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Woodruff Cave, located near Lake Waramaug in New Preston, Connecticut, is a multi-component Native American site that exhibits exceptional preservation of faunal remains. Researchers with the Institute for American Indian Studies (IAIS) have been reanalyzing this collection since 2021 to shed new light on the assemblage and reassess previous interpretations of the site. While the original excavators in the 1970s had assessed the majority of the collection to have been deposited during the Late Woodland period, lithic tool analysis demonstrates the cave was also used extensively in the Late and Terminal Archaic periods. Faunal analysis confirms the identification of elk in the assemblage, and the use of Zoo Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) allowed for the identification of highly fragmented sheep bones as well. Fish remains were only identified in the shallow, recently developed stratigraphy of the site; however, absorbed lipid analysis conducted on ceramic sherds from the Woodland component of the site indicates regular use of fish. This paper discusses osteological preservation in a region where such preservation is rare, as well as the importance of returning to legacy collections with new methodology, technology, and research goals.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51121