Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Before Abandonment: Social Change In Pre-Colonial Housepit 54, Bridge River Site (Eerl4), British Columbia, Kathryn L. Bobolinski

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Housepit 54 at the Bridge River pithouse village in south-central British Columbia provides a glimpse into the complex cultural practices that occurred in this area in the past. This village, which includes approximately 80 semi-subterranean structures, was occupied during four periods, approximately 1800- 1600 cal. B.P., 1600-1300 cal. B.P., 1300-1000 cal. B.P. and 500-100 cal. B.P, firmly placing the site within both a historic and a pre-Colonial context. The two pre-Colonial floors, IIb (1288-1058 cal B.P.) and IIa (1184-1050 cal B.P.), that represent the occupation of Housepit 54 directly prior to the pre-Colonial villages abandonment are the focus of this …

From Turkeys To Tamales: Paleoindian To Preclassic Period Faunal Use At Maya Hak Cab Pek Rockshelter In Southern Belize, Stephanie Raye Orsini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Very little is known about Paleoindian and Archaic subsistence strategies of the people of Mesoamerica prior to the development of ceramics. Rockshelters with good preservation and stratigraphic deposits can provide excellent contexts for a comparative faunal analysis though time. In February of 2014 the Bladen Paleoindian and Archaic Project (BPAP), directed by Dr. Keith Prufer, began excavations at the rockshelter Maya Hak Cab Pek (MHCP). The site has evidence for human activities from the Paleoindian period (11,500 BC to 8,000 BC) through the Preclassic Maya period (2,000 BC to AD 250). This research uses zooarchaeological analysis to investigate animal use …

Dogs Are Expensive: Cost-Benefit Perspectives On Canid Ownership At Housepit 54, Bridge River, British Columbia, Ben B. Chiewphasa

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The presence of dogs in the Housepit 54 (HP 54) faunal assemblage of the Bridge River site (EeRl4) raises questions regarding their roles within Canadian Plateau prehistory, specifically their contributions to networked household economies. Ethnohistoric sources often cite dogs as “jacks of all trades,” household entities that can act as beasts of burden, hunters, prized companions, or as a husbanded food resource. The 2012-2014 field seasons yielded variation in dog frequencies throughout 10 superimposed floors (IIj-IIa); these fluctuations occurred alongside changing densities of ungulates and salmon remains. The thesis incorporates multivariate analyses to determine how dogs could have allowed HP …

Species Identification Of The Stylohyoid Bone For North American Artiodactyls, Thomas A. Hale

All Master's Theses

Zooarchaeologists cannot identify mammal species by their stylohyoid bones. Current trends in zooarchaeological research stress the need for rigorous and accessible identification methodology. I examined the stylohyoids of 15 hooved mammals: cattle, bison, domestic sheep, bighorn sheep, Dall sheep, mountain goat, domestic goat, elk, caribou, white-tailed deer, mule deer, moose, pronghorn antelope, domestic pig, and horse. Objectives included documenting how to side the stylohyoid (left or right), and producing species identification criteria based on large samples. A total of 325 samples were measured from eight repositories. Written descriptions, photographs, and success ratios for metrics and distinct traits are included for …

A Comparative Faunal Analysis Of British Military Contexts At Brimstone Hill Fortress, St. Kitts, West Indies, Callie Roller Bennett

Masters Theses

The Caribbean island of St. Kitts was one of the wealthiest colonies in the British Empire during the late 17^th through early 19^th centuries because of its production and export of sugar. The British sought to defend the island from foreign invaders by building a large military fortification on the island called Brimstone Hill Fortress. Built beginning in 1690, the fort was home to a community of enslaved Africans, British army officers, British Royal Engineers, and enlisted soldiers up until its abandonment in the mid 1800s. To feed such a diverse workforce, the British military utilized imported provisions …

Patterns In Faunal Remains At Fort St. Joseph, A French Fur Trade Post In The Western Great Lakes, Joseph Hearns

Masters Theses

Faunal studies have the potential to detect a variety of patterns in animal processing activities at an archaeological site. The spatial relationships of taphonomic mechanisms observed within the animal bone assemblage illuminate the use of space on a site as well as the patterns of waste discard. Patterns within the formation processes influencing the distribution of faunal remains serve as the basis for interpretation of animal processing behaviors. This study analyzes a sample of animal bones from Fort St. Joseph (20BE23), an eighteenth-century French fur trade post in the western Great Lakes region. This post was a hub of exchange …

Collecting In Context: A Study Of The Milwaukee Public Museum's French Paleolithic Faunal Collection, Rebecca Fetzer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the history of collecting practices of individual collectors and

museums of French Paleolithic archaeological material between 1869 and 1945. During this time period, thousands of French archaeological artifacts were dispersed to museums throughout North America, many with scant provenience. National agendas and the social and economic factors of the time greatly affected their dispersal. The individual agendas of the collector also played a role. This in turn had impacts on the overall understanding of these collections as well as the contemporary construction of archaeological knowledge relating to the study of early humans.

A sizable French Paleolithic faunal …

Vertebrate Evidence For Diet And Food-Processing At The Multicomponent Finch Site (47 Je-0902) In Jefferson County, Southeastern Wisconsin, Zachary Ryan Stencil

Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this study is the intrasite analysis of the vertebrate faunal assemblage from the Finch Site. The Finch Site (47JE-0902) is located in Jefferson County, southeastern Wisconsin, roughly one mile east from Lake Koshkonong’s southeastern shoreline and the Rock River drainage. Stratigraphy and diagnostic artifacts from numerous cultural features indicate that the site was repeatedly occupied over a temporal span of several thousand years including Paleoindian, Archaic, and Woodland periods. Faunal remains were recovered from 169 excavated units and 119 cultural features across the full horizontal extent of the site.

Investigations of faunal remains from archaeological sites can …

Was It For Walrus? Viking Age Settlement And Medieval Walrus Ivory Trade In Iceland And Greenland, Karen M. Frei, Ashley N. Coutu, Konrad Smiarowski, Ramona Harrison, Christian K. Madsen, Jette Arneborg, Robert Frei, Gardar Guðmundsson, Søren M. Sindbækg, James Woollett, Steven Hartman, Megan Hicks, Thomas Mcgovern

Publications and Research

Walrus-tusk ivory and walrus-hide rope were highly desired goods in Viking Age north-west Europe. New finds of walrus bone and ivory in early Viking Age contexts in Iceland are concentrated in the south-west, and suggest extensive exploitation of nearby walrus for meat, hide and ivory during the first century of settlement. In Greenland, archaeofauna suggest a very different specialized long-distance hunting of the much larger walrus populations in the Disko Bay area that brought mainly ivory to the settlement areas and eventually to European markets. New lead isotopic analysis of archaeological walrus ivory and bone from Greenland and Iceland offers …

Historic Philadelphia Foodways: A Consideration Of Catfish Cookery, Teagan Schweitzer

Northeast Historical Archaeology

This article explores the consumption of catfish in the Philadelphia area during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although not extremley popular in the region today, in the past this fish was an important part of the culinary landscape, in particular as part of a meal referred to as "catfish and waffles." Evidence from zooarchaeological and documentary research is used to justify this claim.

Dining With John And Catharine Butler Before The Close Of The Eighteenth Century, Eva Macdonald, Suzanne Needs-Howarth

Northeast Historical Archaeology

The partial excavation of the homestead of Colonel John Butler in the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake has afforded the opportunity to explore the daily activities of one Loyalist family after the establishment of the British colony of Upper Canada in the 1780s. In particular, the large collection of zooarchaeological material (over 14,5000 specimens) can provide information about the availability of wild animal species, as well as the types of domestic animals that the Butlers kept on their farm. Butchering marks provide further insight into the types of meat cuts used in cooking meals for the family and guests. These are compared …

Zooarchaeology And Social History Of The Butler-Mccook Homestead, Hartford, Connecticut, Nicholas Bellantoni, Robert Gradie Iii, David Poirier

Northeast Historical Archaeology

No abstract is available at this time.

The Potential Applications Of Tooth Cement Increment Analysis In Historical Archaeology, David B. Landon

Northeast Historical Archaeology

The study of incremental structures in animal teeth is an analytical technique that is receiving increased attention from zooarchaeologists working in many parts of the world. The seasonal and annual cycles in the formation of tooth increments makes them ideal for determining the age of an animal when it was killed and the season of its death. This type of information can contribute significantly to interpretations of past animal husbandry practices. A sample of eight domestic animal teeth from the Wilkinson Backlot Site in dowtown Boston, Massachusetts, were studied in this fashion. Microscopic examination of the increment pattern of the …

From Pork To Mutton: A Zooarchaeological Perspective On Colonial New Amsterdam And Early New York City, Haskell J. Greenfield

Northeast Historical Archaeology

This article analyzes the zooarchaeological remains from historical deposits to increase our understanding of the relationship between diet and ethnicity in early colonial New York City. Excavations at the Broad Financial Plaza recovered faunal remains documenting approximatley two centuries of historical occupation (middle 17th to the middle of the 19th century), a sequence rivaled by few other early colonial North American localities. Several trends are apparent in the data. Relative frequencies of pig remains declined while mutton and cattle increased correspondingly as New Amsterdam became the British colony of New York and as the Dutch residents on the block were …

A Study Of Faunal Consumption At The Gallinazo Group Site, Northern Coast Of Peru, Claire Venet-Rogers

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is an investigation into consumption patterns at the Gallinazo Group archaeological site, from the Early Intermediate Period (200 B.C. to 800 A.D.), on the Peruvian north coast. Faunal samples were recovered from two different but contemporaneous contexts: a civic-ceremonial platform mound and an Architectural Compound in a residential sector. The main objectives were: 1) create a faunal database for the site; 2) assess the nature of faunal resources consumed in these two different contexts; and 3) contribute to the zooarchaeological literature on the use of consumption patterns to reconstruct aspects of ancient complex societies. For each specimen collected, …

The Vertebrate Fauna Of Zebree’S Big Lake Phase, Lydia Dorsey Carmody

Masters Theses

Excavated during the late 1960’s and mid 1970’s, Zebree (3MS20) serves as a well-known yet under-analyzed example of a Terminal Late Woodland/Early Mississippian (A.D. 800 to 1000) site in the Eastern Lowlands of the Central Mississippi Valley. In particular, a large portion of the vertebrate fauna collected during Zebree’s multi-season excavations has remained unidentified and unanalyzed since the initial site report. This research seeks to readdress the Terminal Late Woodland/Early Mississippian Big Lake phase (A.D. 800 to 1050) faunal collection in order to gain a more in-depth understanding of subsistence strategies at the Zebree site during a transitional time frame …

Faunal Subsistence Strategies Among Initial Period Coastal Fishers At The Gramalote Site In The Moche Valley Of Peru, Rachel Catherine Mctavish

Theses and Dissertations

This faunal analysis focuses on vertebrate remains from the northern coastal site of Gramalote in the lower Moche Valley of Peru. Gramalote dates to the Initial Period (1800-900 BC), a time of great change due to a rise of inland agricultural and increasing sedentism. This intrasite analysis of fauna at Gramalote seeks to contextualize potential subsistence shifts through time. Subsistence specialization regarding fish exploitation of coastal fishers is explored through faunal analysis of vertebrates at this site. For an ecological perspective, this project examines the application of Moseley's Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization and Optimal Foraging Theory models.

The sample …

Faunal Analysis Of Sachsen Cave Shelter: A Zooarchaeological Approach To Site Function, Meagan Elizabeth Dennison

Masters Theses

Faunal remains are not often utilized to explore settlement practices and site use by prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the southeastern United States. Instead, lithic reduction sequences and site features are generally relied upon when making these kinds of interpretations. Faunal analysis, however, can offer an additional line of support to these interpretations, especially when seasonal indicators, transport of large animal remains and diversity of species are taken into account. This thesis is an attempt to address the prehistoric use of Sachsen Cave Shelter through the lens faunal analysis. Sachsen Cave Shelter is a large sandstone rock shelter located on the Upper …

Bones In The Landfill: A Zooarchaeological Study From Faneuil Hall, Linda M. Santoro

Graduate Masters Theses

Using data from recent archaeological excavations at Faneuil Hall in Boston, this thesis examines how an 18th-century urban landfill context can be used towards understanding the broader foodways of a city community. Much of today's urban landscape has been artificially created over time, often through the efforts of communities to fill land and dispose of their garbage, and it is important for archaeologists to utilize these contexts in meaningful ways. The Town Dock was gradually filled in with the daily trash of the merchants, shop-keepers, and other residents of the nearby community, and the faunal assemblage gives us a glimpse …

Comparative Analysis Of The Faunal Remains From British Royal Engineer And Enslaved African Occupations At Brimstone Hill Fortress, St. Kitts, West Indies, Ann Marie Ramsey

Masters Theses

During the 17^th through 19^th centuries, economic interests favoring sugarcane production and export over domestic animal husbandry, necessitated an import-based subsistence strategy in many Caribbean colonies. British military stationed on the island of St. Kitts also adopted this practice of provisioning its soldiers and the enslaved Africans who served at Brimstone Hill Fortress. Comparative analysis of the faunal materials recovered at BSH 3 Terrace 1 (Royal Engineers Officer’s quarters) and Terrace 3 (enslaved Africans’ occupation) show that military personnel and enslaved Africans alike supplemented their rations (i.e. salted fish or barreled pork or beef) with locally obtained foods …

Seasonal Subsistence In Late Woodland Southwestern Ontario: An Examination Of The Relationships Between Resource Availability, Maize Agriculture, And Faunal Procurement And Processing Strategies, Lindsay J. Foreman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study uses the zooarchaeological record to examine the seasonal mobility and scheduling of faunal procurement and processing activities by southwestern Ontario’s two Late Woodland (ca. A.D. 800-1600) communities, Western Basin and Iroquoian. Faunal datasets helped to reconstruct the timing and location of Western Basin annual hunting and fishing pursuits and identified a greater degree of flexibility in the organization of these activities than previously recognized, as well as in comparison to contemporaneous Iroquoian communities who also occupied this region.

Western Basin groups oriented themselves near lakes and rivers year-round where they exploited locally abundant fish, mammals, birds, and other …

Food And Identity: A Case Study Of Roman Soldiers And Native Civilians In Roman Britain, Aaron Michael Bobik

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Food is a universal medium through which identity is expressed. In cultures both past and present, food represents a direct way to communicate many aspects of identity such as ethnicity, nationality, status, age, and gender. In archaeology, while the nutritional and economic roles of food have been a topic of study for decades, the relationship between food and identity is a research area largely in its infancy. In my thesis, I explore general aspects of identity in the past, and in particular, I utilize a case study of four archaeological sites (Segontium (Caernarfon), Portchester Castle, Wavendon Gate, and Dragonby) to …

Faunal Remains From The Pine Hill Site (Ps-6), St. Lawrence County, New York, Jessica Lee Vavrasek

Masters Theses

The Pine Hill collection was discovered in the archaeology lab at State University of New York College at Potsdam after remaining unstudied for over 30 years since its initial excavation in the 1960s and 1970s. Pine Hill has been identified as a fifteenth century St. Lawrence Iroquois village site, located in St. Lawrence County, New York. The faunal remains and bone tools from the site indicate food procurement strategies, seasonal activities, the presence of discrete activity areas at the site, and the production and use of a wide range of bone tools. Replication experiments conducted on several bone tool types …

A Faunal Analysis Of 1wx15, The Indian Hill Site, Wilcox County, Alabama, Elizabeth Ellen Lovett

Masters Theses

Abstract

This study seeks to expand the knowledge of Woodland subsistence practices in the Alabama River valley by presenting an analysis of the faunal assemblage from the Indian Hill site, 1WX15. Additionally, this study presents a comparison of 1WX15 to other sites from the Tombigbee, Alabama, and Coosa river valleys in order to present a broad picture of Woodland subsistence in and near the Eastern Gulf Coastal Plain.

An intra-site comparison revealed the primary vertebrate resources exploited were mammals and turtles. The substantial amount of turtle fragments suggested the site was occupied during warm months, with a fall and winter …

Beef, Mutton, Pork, And A Taste Of Turtle: Zooarchaeology And Nineteenth-Century African American Foodways At The Boston-Higginbotham House, Nantucket, Massachusetts, Michael Andrew Way

Graduate Masters Theses

In 1774, nearly ten years before slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, an emancipated African American weaver named Seneca Boston purchased a tract of land in the Newtown section of Nantucket, Massachusetts. It is here that over the next thirty years Seneca Boston and his Wampanoag wife, Thankful Micah, would build a house, now known as the Boston-Higginbotham House, and raise six children. The Boston-Higginbotham House was home to the descendents of Seneca Boston and Thankful Micah for over one hundred years. Throughout the 19th century a vibrant and active African American community was developing in Newtown, and several generations of …

Large Mammal Subsistence At Archaeological Site 1ba21, Lindsay Lagrange

Anthropology Undergraduate Senior Theses

For thousands of years American Indians lived and survived in the southeastern part of North America. They used traditional hunting technologies to capture and kill many different species of animals which furnished protein in their diet and raw material for manufacture of clothing and tools. These animals include hundreds of different species of fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals. While these diets were varied depending on geographic location and social affiliation, archaeologists have found patterns in the diets of the Southeastern Indians. They have found and continue to find that many American Indians in the Southeast were eating copious amounts …

Three Decades In The Cold And Wet: A Career In Northern Archaeology, Sophia Perdikaris, George Hambrecht, Ramona Harrison

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

Thomas H. McGovern has been a pioneering researcher in the North Atlantic region for most of the past 40 years. He has taken his specialty in zooarchaeology beyond counting bones to actually addressing questions about human environment interactions and human response to extreme environmental events. A prolific writer and researcher with a multitude of publications and an impressive funding record, McGovern has always been a proponent of multidisciplinarity and international collaboration. His vision resulted in the creation of the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) that currently has more than 400 scientific partners and has been leading projects throughout the Circum …

Current Research In Andean Archaeology, Andean Past 9, Juan B. Leoni, Carolina Aguero, Mauricio Uribe, Carlos Carrasco, Leonor Adan, Cora Moragas, Flora Viches, Matthias Strecker, Freddy Taboada, Claudia Rivera, Sergio Calla, Patricia Alvarez, Robert Mark, Ian Wainwright, Mati Raudsepp, Matthew P. Sayre, Natali Luisa Lopez Aldave, J. Lee Hollowell

Andean Past

No abstract provided.

The Shifting Baseline Of Northern Fur Seal Ecology In The Northeast Pacific Ocean, Seth D. Newsome, Michael A. Etnier, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Donald L. Phillips, Marcel Van Tuinen, Elizabeth A. Hadley, Daniel P. Costa, Douglas J. Kennett, Tom P. Guilderson, Paul L. Koch

Anthropology Faculty and Staff Publications

Historical data provide a baseline against which to judge the significance of recent ecological shifts and guide conservation strategies, especially for species decimated by pre-20th century harvesting. Northern fur seals (NFS; Callorhinus ursinus) are a common pinniped species in archaeological sites from southern California to the Aleutian Islands, yet today they breed almost exclusively on offshore islands at high latitudes. Harvest profiles from archaeological sites contain many unweaned pups, confirming the presence of temperate-latitude breeding colonies in California, the Pacific Northwest, and the eastern Aleutian Islands. Isotopic results suggest that prehistoric NFS fed offshore across their entire range, that …

The Destruction Of Skeletal Elements By Carnivores: The Growth Of A General Model For Skeletal Element Destruction And Survival In Zooarchaeological Assemblages, Naomi Cleghorn, Curtis W. Marean

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Publications

In the 1960s, Brain published on a series of taphonomic studies in which he observed the destruction of goat bones by pastoralists and domestic dogs. Those studies were notable and novel for a variety of reasons: 1) the attempt to control for complex parameters through the use of what we now recognize as experimental and naturalistic actualism, 2) documentation of the destructive impact on skeletal element abundance by secondary carnivore consumers, and 3) the attempt to understand the mechanical aspects of this process, and thus establish the foundation for justifiable uniformitarianism. This work set the stage for a proliferation of …