You Are What You Wear: A Comparison of Hide Use in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of the Wyoming Basin

Summary

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

What we wear, and why we choose to wear it, is a visual representation of our identity. Clothing in an anthropological context has been explored heavily in cultural anthropology, however due to many issues revolving around preservation clothing is rarely found in archaeological contexts. In cold and dry environments such as those in the Wyoming Basin this is especially true due to its extreme environmental conditions. Some research has delved into the cultural significance of clothing in the past, but it usually stems from ethnographic examples of clothing. By incorporating ethnographic uses of different species for hide use and comparing this to species represented in the archaeological record, we can look at clothing in the archaeological record indirectly. This research will compare the species proportionally represented in a sample of Late Archaic sites in the Wyoming Basin and those same species used for clothing among ethnographic groups in high latitude environments. This will allow me to identify correlations between the archaeological and ethnographic record and to see what factors influence clothing choice.

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): 52893