3/4 Lecture → Kennedy’s Guest Lecture on Zooarchaeology ● Questions Zooarchaeologists ask: ○ What was the role of humans in eliminating megafauna in the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age? ○ How did enslaved Africans use unwanted cuts of meat or cast-offs to create a new southern American, creole cuisine? ● Definitions of Zooarchaeology: ○ The study of : ■ human-animal relationships in the past ■ environments, ecologies, and climates ■ the study of ancient diet and subsistence ● Subsistence → how people in the past got their found ○ Fishing, hunting, farming, etc. ● What are examples of common zooarchaeological artifacts? ○ Copperlites, animal bones, items related to animal products (i.e. animal hides) ● How do animal bones end up in archaeological contexts? ○ Building with animal bones/elements ○ Domestication of animals within archaeological sites ■ Her list: food/diet, trash, bone tools, products, construction materials, ceremonial offerings, the environment ● What are the methods zooarchaeologists use to gather observations/research? ○ Fish faunal remains ○ Meat cuts ○ Aging bones ○ Stable isotope analysis ○ Stomach contents ○ ZooMS ● What can zooarchaeology tell us about the past? ○ Did Spanish colonial tax obligations lead to overfishing? ■ Change in fish species over time in Northern Peru ■ Under colonial rule, Peruvians were under pressure to deliver their goods for tax collection, the coast was overfished due to a lack of time and stress ○ Did domestic animal health decline under Spanish tax obligations? ■ Animals as caravans, cargo animals, draught animals ■ Exostosis in animal feet caused by overworking/stress 3/6 Lecture → Site Mapping & Excavation ● Site Mapping ○ Why do archaeologists need to make accurate maps of sites? ○ Variety of methods: ■ Tape and compass ■ Plane table and Alidade (theodolite) ■ Total station ● Creation of a reference grid on a site ○ Allows for a easy way to record findings and divide the excavation ● Important of Provenience ○ X, Y, and Z ○ Establishment of provenience in 3 dimensions: ■ Allows us to establish the association between artifacts, ecofacts, and features → to fully document the archaeological context ● Artifacts are at their best when discovered and recorded (in situ) or how/where they were found ○ Important of “point plotting” artifacts ● Z - The vertical dimension ○ Establishment of a datum ● Review questions: ○ What are we mapping or point plotting? ○ What determines what kinds of artifacts will last? ● Preservation ○ What do you expect to find and point to? ○ What will determine the level of object-preservation in a site? ■ i.e. oxygen ○ What do microorganisms need in order to survive and decompose artifacts ■ i.e. lack of oxygen lets bodies in bogs stay intact ● Why and how do archaeologists excavate? ○ Kinds of units/blocks: trenches, test unites, open exposures ○ Document both time and behavior ■ Box-grid style excavation ○ Do you dig all levels, including those that are arbitrary to the site? ● Natural straigraphy v. cultural stratigraphy ● The nuts and bolts of archaeological excavation: ○ Trowel, pick, shovel, and brush ○ Notes, drawings, photos, video, balloon/kite imagery, drone imagery ● Screening and Flotation ○ Using water and screens to sift through remaining dirt at an archaeological site to ensure that nothing has been missed ■ Considerations with screening: ● Screen form, screen size, dry or water? 3/10 Lecture → Site Formation Processes ● What is geoarchaeology? ○ The application of the concepts and methodologies of the geosciences to archaeological research projects ● What is so important about stratification in archaeology? ○ A chronological, superimposed laying of natural sediments and cultural deposits ○ Law of superposition (Nicolaus Steno in the 17th century) ■ The older natural materials are deeper and the newer materials sit on top (in an undisturbed setting) ○ Law of association ■ In an undisturbed setting, artifacts/features that are recognized within the same strata are associated with one another from the same time period ● The difference between sediments and soils ○ Sediments and oxidizing bedrock are what form soil ○ Types of sediments: ■ Alluvial ● (deposit through water-born action) ■ Eolian ● (wind blown sediments) ■ Colluvial ● (erosion, gravity, movement of sediments) ○ 4 steps of simple soil formation: ■ Bedrock begins to disintegrate ■ Organic materials facilitate disintegration ■ Horizons form ■ Developed soil supports thick vegetation ○ What is a marker bed? ■ Chronologically mark a day/week in the past ● Vt. Mazama Ash, 6900 years ago ● Types of Contexts ○ The sites archaeologists dig up today are NEVER a direct reflection of patterns of ancient life. ○ Artifacts and their contexts are affected both by cultural and physical processes before they enter the archaeological record and after. ○ The Systemic context ■ Before artifacts/features are in the ground ○ The Archaeological context ■ The context in which time and space work together to form a narrative ● Formation processes within the Systemic Context ○ Processes of cultural deposition: ■ Discard (purposeful, into the midden or the hearth) ■ Loss (unintentional) ■ Caching (individuals would store items/bury them that they do not regularly use, i.e. a hunting tool kit that could be buried in a summer location and returned to after travelling the land later) ■ Ritual interment (can sometimes look like caching, an offering left) ● Cultural disturbance processes ○ How humans interact with stratification culturally to change the layers ● Reused? Or Reclaimed? (related cultural deposition processes) ○ Depend on the context from which it has come ○ Reclamation → a past individual finding a stone tool/pottery in the ground and using that ■ Implications for the age of artifacts? ● i.e. Inca populations using older items for decoration/purpose ○ Reused → taking a broken material and using it for another purpose ● What could lead to ‘reverse stratigraphy’? ○ When an archaeologist is excavating, they layer the dirt in reverse order when removing it from the site ● Formation processes in the Archaeological Context ○ Items are in the systemic process when they are being used, artifacts/features become part of the Archaeological Context once they are in the ground ● Turbations in Archaeology: ○ Floral turbation ■ Plants/trees causing disturbance to the layers of sediment ○ Faunal turbation ■ Animals causing a disturbance to the layers of sediment ● i.e. borrowing animals ■ Krotovina is what is left from a burrowing animal ○ Cryoturbation ■ Turbation formed in layers of sediments in certain latitudes from freezing (expanding) and thawing repeatedly ● Pushes artifacts/ecofacts up through the layers ○ Graviturbation ■ Sites being affected by gravity creating striations on the land ● Slope wash, mudflow, rockfall, debris slide, soil creep, etc. ○ Argilliturbation ■ Clay rich soils that are inundated with water will expand and when they dry out in the others seasons they expand and cause cracking ● Artifacts/ecofacts can be pushed to the side or up ● Large artifacts can reside at the top and smaller ones may be deposited to the bottom of the site ● Larger Scale Geomorphological Issues for Archaeology: ○ Geomorphology ■ Blown/moved sediments can cover and complete hide sites ● i.e. Barchan Dunes in Peru ● i.e. dune formations on the surface of Mars Archaeological Dating: Relative & Absolute Methods ● Relative vs. Exact Dating ○ Relative → saying that a site/artifacts is earlier or later than others around them ○ Exact → the year or exact period specific to the site/artifact ● Oscar Montelius (1843-1921) ○ “Father” of archaeological seriation and developing methods for dating ● Sir Flinders Petrie (1899) ○ Seriated the entire Egpytian pottery sequence beginning with the historical ceramics back into the pre-Dynastic Period ● Nels Nelson (early 1900s) ○ Excavated at Pueblo San Cristobal in the 1910s ○ Utilized the marker fossil/ artifact concept to look at culture change over time in the American South West ■ Looked particularly into middens ● People have added and returned over centuries to dump waste, create a layered stratigraphic layers for the middens ○ Wanted to identify “marker” artifacts or styles ■ A focus on the presence or absence of marker artifacts (time diagnostic artifacts) ○ Markers might no be as well if the pot/artifact found was not a common style ● Why would styles change over time? (James Deetz) ○ Style and fad ○ Technological change ○ Economic change ○ Culture contact ○ Demographic shifts ○ Warfare ○ What about the rapidity of change? ● Seriation is hugely beneficial ○ fine grained method for establishing relative chronology ○ Basis for establishing relative contemporary of sites ■ For distinguishing settlement systems ○ How would you know which were earlier and which later? ● Absolute Dating ○ Already dated artifacts are Calendrics (past 5,000-6,000 years) ■ Like coins or postage stamps ○ Radiocarbon Dating ■ Ranged from years from 150 before present to about 45,000 b.p. ○ Dendrochronology (back to 8,000 years) ■ Counting tree rings ○ Trapped Charge Methods: ■ Thermoluminescence (heated mineral-based objects) ■ Electron Spin Resonance (teeth and burned stone tools) ■ Optically stimulated luminescence (dirt/soil) ○ Potassium Argon Dating (volcanic contexts) (500,000 to several million years ago can be dated with this method ● R.E. Taylor → “The application of the 14C (Radio Carbon) method to archaeological materials is generally considered to be a watershed event in the history of archaeology and, in particular, in prehistoric studies.” ● Radiocarbon Dating ○ Wood, leather, bone are most commonly dated ○ Around 100 bp to 45,000 bp ○ Based on the fact that there are relatively constant isotopes of C14 with other C’s that are relative depending on the year ○ All living things consume/take on this ratio of C14 ■ Until they die, which can show when a living thing died ● The annual decay is known and can be seen with Carbon ○ Radioactive ○ When archaeologists measure the amount remaining vs. the amount in the atmosphere using the known half-life of C14 ○ Collaboration curve is taken and used for archaeologists to date the artifact ● Dendrochronology ○ Tree rings are created each year ○ They are unaffected by the changing atmospheric C14 ratios after that year ○ Limitations of this dating process: ■ Time limitations ■ Minimum size AMS ■ Problems of contamination ○ Can show good years and bad years with growing conditions ■ Can show a drought or a wet season ○ For literally looking at only tree rings to count limitations are: ■ Only the past 4,000-8,000 years can be measured ■ Need intact wood ■ Need a regional master sequence ● Thermoluminescence Dating (TL) ○ Used for dating artifacts made of material that is crystalline in structure ■ i.e. pottery (ceramics), lithics, lava ○ These materials burn with different flame colors when subjected to intense head ○ Luminescence is proportional to the accumulated radiation load in the crystalline method Middle Range Theory: Taphonomy, Ethnoarchaeology, & Experimental Archaeology ● Assemblage: ○ Set of artifacts (of many different types and classes) that comes from one relatively defined archaeological context → i.e. one site, a single strata or level, a feature ● Component: ○ One or more strata from a single site which are believed to be contemporary ● Middle Range Theory & Taphonomy ■ How do we go from all of the stuff (archaeological context) to understanding or inferring human behavior in the past? ○ Formal Analogy: ■ Comparison with analogs to better understand new findings ■ Belief that two things that roughly look alike function alike (wherever on earth it is found, i.e. arrowheads and pots) ○ Relational Analogy: ■ Just comparing an artifact with those found around the area (i.e. a pot found at Mesa Verde being compared with those found in the southwest) ■ Ideally even examine ceramics being made today by similar tribes/groups ○ Middle Range Theory: Why is it different? ■ Establishing of ‘causal linkages’ between observable phenomena and patterns in archaeological contexts ■ Bridging gaps between low level assumptions and high level theoretical knowledge ■ The ability to say “why” the causal linkage exists (uniformitarianism) ■ 3 Tools of MRT: ● Taphonomy ● Experimental Archaeology ● Ethnoarchaeology ● Taphonomy: ○ The importance of studying natural processes that affect archaeological assemblages ■ Interpret the “static” patterns of anthropology ○ Greek meaning “laws of burial” ■ Science of the laws concerning embedding or burial ■ “The study of the transition, in all details, of organics from the biosphere into the lithosphere or geological record” I.A. Efremov 1940 (Russian paleontologist) ○ Important to archaeologists because it helps understand the pattern of artifacts ■ “Study of how natural processes contribute to the formation of archaeological sites” ● Natural patterns vs. Cultural (created by people) Patterns ■ Context of the site ● Where is it located? ● Open air vs. closed (i.e. caves) ● Alluvial, eolian, colluvial (soils) ■ Principle of Uniformitarianism ● Skeletal disarticulation example ○ How can we determine something is human made and not natural ■ i.e. how do we tell a bison jump site isn’t natural ○ Taphonomic Agents: ■ How humans and natural processes affect the assemblage of artifacts and ecofacts at a site ● Natural decomposition and disarticulation of animals ● Carnivore action ● Climate and environmental factors ● Krotovinas (burrowing rodents) ● Pack rat middens ■ Natural processes are more predictable than human behavior ○ Why did they use taphonomy in the Bison Site Case Study? ■ Archaeologists want to be able to rule out naturally caused patterns. Need to identify baseline patterns created naturally, so that we can then see patterns that must be cultural ■ Bison were taken by a grass fire or a natural process ● Experimental Archaeology ○ Involved the recreation and reuse of ancient technologies, foods, construction, etc. to further understand the processes that took place in the past from primary research ○ Attempts to reproduce technology, behavior, and cultural aspects of prehistoric people ○ Useful for trying to interpret production and function of material culture ○ Wide range of cultural aspects of prehistoric lifeways ○ Use wear analysis: ■ Analysis is done with a microscope to examine the surface and edges of stone tools ■ Trying to identify the function of the tool ■ Examining the polish ● Cutting, sawing, smashing, scraping? ■ On what material ● Wood, bone, antler, plants, leather? ○ Can also look at post depositional processes ■ Animal trampling, root etching ○ ● Ethnoarchaeology ○ Archaeologists who excavate normally but also live alongside peoples who are believed to live similar lifestyles to those of the past ○ Draw comparisons and apply these to the archaeological record: ■ Material culture ■ Social organization ■ Use of social spaces ● Where trash/middens exist ○ Ask questions and understand a culture further ○ Lewis Binford → middle range theory, ethnography, fieldwork ■ Lived with the Nunamiut tribes of Canada (1979,1980) ● Settlement patterns ● Hunting strategies ○ Storage ● Disarticulation and discard ● Meat vs. marrow processing ○ Todd A. Surovell (Chair of Dept. at UW) ■ Studies Clovis hunters ■ Lived with northern Mongolia with the Dukkah ● Mongolian Reindeer herder ○ Semi-nomadic ○ Site formation processes ○ Activity areas ■ Eating, cooking, discard