1. Zooarchaeology A Brief Overview Catherine Bohner Session 4, 2010

2. What is zooarchaeology? It is a multidisciplinary field based on the analysis of animal remains from archaeology sites. This relatively young discipline seeks to understand how and in what ways humans and animals have interacted in the past, and how these interactions have affected human culture and the environmental context in which it exists.

3. Why Zooarchaeology? To answer questions about animals and the relationship with people: How did people use animals in the past? Did they consider any animals special? What was the environment like in the past? How has the environment changed?

4. Where do we find animal bones? 3 Main Types of Deposit: - Home or village refuse deposit - Refuse from specialized location: kill site or location of processing - Intentional Deposition

7. What can animal bones tell us? We can learn about... - Subsistence patterns - Diet and cuisine - Seasonality - Environment - Meaning attached to animals

8. Subsistence Patterns - Frequency of wild, domestic taxa - Diet contribution estimates - Primary and Secondary Products - Demography and mortality profiles - Stress markers

11. Diet and Cuisine Differential Access Specialized Use Butchery Patterns

12. Special Use of Animals Ornamentation Ritual burials of/with animals Trade and Exchange Symbolism

13. Is it all about bones? Supplemented by: Stable isotope analyses of human bone Residue analyses on ceramic remains Paleoenvironmental studies Imagery of animals Written sources Related artifacts and features

14. In Sanisera... What were the residents of Sanisera eating? How did this compare with Roman cuisine? Does this relationship suggest anything about class or status? What kind of variation is there? Were shells used as decoration or food? What is the significance of the bull horns?

15. For more reading... Articles: Ask me! I still have links/pdfs Books: Reitz and Wing. Zooarchaeology . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. O'Connor. Archaeology of Animal Bones . College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2000.