Multi-site zooarchaeological comparisons of indigenous and colonial contexts

My self-imposed goal for this project was to establish a guideline for how I will interpret the data for my dissertation. The dataset for this project comes from the Digital Archaeological Record (TDAR), which is an open-source database for archaeological data. The goal for this project was to present some initial analytical methods that allow me to compare post-contact archaeological contexts. Due to still being in the data collection stage of my dissertation research, I decided to use three separate datasets from TDAR in order to replicate some early quantitative considerations for my own research. None of the data in this presentation is my own, nor do I plan on presenting or publishing on any of this data.

Quantitative analysis was the driving force behind this project, both in presentation and in theoretical application. As will be discussed later on in this digital presentation, many observations were made during the data cleaning and analysis that have served as lessons for my own current data entry. This project also developed and changed my theoretical approach toward quantitative analysis, and there will be conversation around how zooarchaeological research fits into larger quantitative theory.

The three selected sites, Mission San Agustin, the Apalachicola site, and the Spanish Fort site were all picked due to being contemporaneous to my dissertation site: the Musgrove Site, which was occupied as a trading post site between 1732 and 1742. More historical background will be placed on these three sites, and how they are connected to one another, in the next session. Not only are there temporal and cultural similarities between these two sites, these three sites represent an interesting insight into three contrasting representations of subsistence strategies during the colonial period in North America. This makes sense given that Apalachicola and Spanish Fort are Southeastern localities, and Mission San Agustin is a site in Arizona, but there is far more cultural and historical context behind the differences between them.

These differences have been highlighted over time through zooarchaeological analysis, with many of these differences being representative of the many questions that have driven zooarchaeolgoical analysis and questions throughout the years. There is a complex, and ever expansive, understanding around colonial foodways and subsistence strategies in both colonial and indigenous contexts. This understanding has also been furthered partially through the three separate datasets having already been interpreted and published on. Not only were these three sites selected due to their similarities, but I selected them due to them representing three different sizes of data and having been analyzed and collected within the University of Arizona State Museum by Dr. Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman and her students.

Presentation Outline and Methods

The goal of this presentation is to offer a hybrid between a poster and a paper presentation. I would typically never have this much text written down for either, but for a digitial presentaiton I believe that the context is needed for the reader. Especially since I can not verbally discuss the material. A goal of mine for this presentation was to present the information in a way that someone with zero understanding of zooarchaeology can understand the presentaiton.

A staple of every zooarchaeological publication is a presentation of a species list, typically displayed through a bar chart that indicates either the number of individual specimens (NISP), minimum number of individuals (MNI), weigh, or biomass (Reitz and Wing 2008). For ease of interpretation, and accounting for the discrepancies across even these similar datasets, this data is presented through the number of individual specimens. The first section of this presentation focuses on the species list for each of the three sites. We then move on to a presentation on Age Indicators and Butchery Analysis, which are both funcitons that are of immense interest to my dissertation. Finally, there will be a brief introduciton to spatial analysis through zooarchaeological data.

The data presented in this presentaiton were all acquired online through TDAR, and as such were not of my own creation. I took each dataset and combined them one another to produce a streamlined approach. While created under the same coding system, under the same zooarchaeological approach from Pavao-Zuckerman, there were some inherent descripences within them. This was the result of the individuals who either entered the data online, or the most likely case, just how the data was given to the zooarchaeologist. So there was a need to streamline and clean the data, despite the similarity in analysis. Everything presented in this presentaiton was analyzed and created through RStudio.

Map demonstrating Site Locations

Impact, or lack there of, of colonialism on subsistence strategies in the Southeast and Southwest

The focus on the Southeast in this presentation is on eighteenth century Creek communities, due to the zooarchaeological record having produced influential research around their subsistence strategies as well as the cultural connection to the Musgrove Cowpen site that will serve as the dataset for my dissertation. Zooarchaeological analyses of Upper Creek sites (Pavão-Zuckerman 2000, 2007) and Lower Creek sites (O’Steen 2007) align with ethnohistoric research that depicts a continuance of the use of wild taxa (Pavao-Zuckerman 2017; Pavao-Zuckerman and Reitz 2006). A shift toward Eurasian domesticates occurred in the latter half of the 18th century, where pig and chicken began to be more widely used at Creek villages (Pavão-Zuckerman 2000, 2007). Zooarchaeological investigations of Creek communities focus predominantly on the deer skin trade, and the archaeology of British colonial sites in the southeast focuses primarily on the cattle meat economy (Reitz and Waselkov 2015). A large reason behind this can be reflected in the two sites that are focused on during this presenation. The Spanish Fort site was predominately inhabited by Spanish individuals, and the Apalachicola site is a Upper Creek site. Due to this, the data presents less diversity and more cattle at the Spanish Fort site and deer and other wild taxa (alongside some pig) at Apalachicola.

The Spanish Fort site was a Spanish settlement in Northern Alabama occupied between 1689 and 1691 and it represents a short term colonial occupation (Copperstone, Mayfield, and Pavao-Zuckerman 2014). Apalachicola, as represented in this presentation, represents a continual occupation of an ancestral Creek village. The data for Apalachicola encompasses two ‘sites’ on the same landscape that represents an older occupation between 1400 and 1600, and a newer occupation between 1715 and 1757. Both sites, Spanish Fort and Apalachicola, are representative of the respective dualities in the colonial Southeast. Eighteenth century indigenous communities were not likely to adopt domesticated animals until after the 1757 that Apalachicola is dated to, while colonial sites had far more domesicated animals alongside some wild taxa but keeping a low specieis diversity. This is where it gets complicated interpreting the Musgrove Cowpens site, as it is contemporaneous with the Apalachicola site, but as a trading post and cattle pen owned by a mixed heritage individual (Mary Musgrove) there are far more domesticated animals. However, the site still differs from other colonial sites in the Southeast (even the mission site of San Luis de Talimali) in that I will still have a high species diversity. In this case, it is almost representative of cattle sites (both mission and non-mission sites) in the Southwest.

Mission San Agustin represents a faunal assemblage at a colonial site from the late seventeenth century into the early eighteenth century. While a colonial mission site, the majority of the labor (including the labor with the domesticated cattle) was done on indigenous landscapes by indigenous peoples (Pavão-Zuckerman 2017; Pavão-Zuckerman amd :aMotta 2007). The environment of the Southwest (particularly Arizona), warm and dry, allowed for large herds of cattle and sheep in a variety of contexts. During the 1680s, the Spanish began their missionization of the O’odham people in the Pimera Alta region of Arizona; occurring while Spanish colonialism was well underway in the more northern Puebloan region (Pavão-Zuckerman 2017:290). O’odham were seminomadic horticulturalists at the time of their missionization, with over 80% of their diet comprised of wild resource procurement that occurred alongside seasonal migrations (Pavão-Zuckerman 2017:290). While adoption of different subsistence strategies ultimately occurred, much like in the Southeast among Creek communities, it was a gradual process (Pavão-Zuckerman 2017:291).

This initial introduction of domesticated livestock was unsuccessful, with a great deal of the early populations being hunted into disappearance quickly after the intial missionaries left a community. However, continual reintroduction of cattle and other livestock caused environmental changes that threaten pre-contact subsistence strategies: with livestock threatening drinking water, the state of agricultural fields, and the environments of wild animals (Pavão-Zuckerman 2017:293). Mission San Agustin’s the faunal assemblage, alongside Mission Cocospera, confirmed ranching as major part of the mission economy and it demonstrated a heavy reliance on cattle (Pavão-Zuckerman 2011, 2017; Pavão-Zuckerman and LaMotta 2007). At Mission San Agustin cattle’s presence in the assemblage’s total NISP and biomass far outweighed those of caprines (sheep and goats), with both values being 3:1 (Pavão-Zuckerman 2017:297). What this case study highlighted was that despite the faunal assemblage demonstrating a primary reliance on cattle, sample bias relating to cattle’s great body size and use for meat may account for this predominance of cattle, something that I will touch on later in the presentation. A discrepancy emerges between the documentary record, which reports much larger sheep herd sizes, and the faunal assemblage. Sheep elements are smaller and less likely to fragment that larger cattle elements, accounting for smaller biomass and less NISP, and the species main use for wool meant that many sheep lived into adulthood. Meanwhile, cattle were more likely to be killed at a younger age.

Bibliography

Chance Copperstone, Tracie Mayfield, and Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman 2014 Faunal Remains from the Apalachicola Ecosystems Project. Report prepared for the National Science Foundation.

Orr, Kelly L. and Gregory S. Lucas 2008 Rural-Urban Connections in the Southern Colonial Market Economy: Zooarchaeological Evidence from the Grange Plantation (9CH137) Trading Post and Cowpens. South Carolina Antiquities 39(1, 2): 1-17.

Orr, Kelly L., Elizabeth J. Reitz, and Gregory S. Lucas 2008 Vertebrate Remains from the Grange Plantation (9CH137) Trading Post and Cow Pens, Savannah, Georgia. Archaeological Report submitted to Southeastern Archaeological Services, Inc., Athens, Georgia.

O’Steen, Lisa 2007 Animal remains. In Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715-1836 edited by Thomas H. Foster, pp. 194-255. The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

Pavào-Zuckerman, Barnet 2000 Vertebrate Subsistence in the Mississippian-Historic Transition. Southeastern Archaeology 19(2): 135-144. 2007 Deerskins and Domesticates: Creek Subsistence and Economic Strategies in the Historic Period. American Antiquity 72(1): 5-33. 2011 Rendering Economies: Native American Labor and Secondary Animal Products in the Eighteenth-Century Pimeria Alta. American Antiquity 76(1): 3-23. 2017 “Missions, Livestock, and Economic Transformations in the Pimerìa Alta.” In New Mexico and the Pimerìa Alta, edited by John G. Douglass and William M. Graves, pp. 289-310. University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado.

Pavào-Zuckerman, Barnet and Vincent M. LaMotta 2007 Missionization and Economic Change in the Pimeria Alta: The Zooarchaeology of San Agustin de Tuscon. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 11(3): 241-268.

Pavão-Zuckerman , Barnet and Elizabeth J. Reitz 2006 Introduction and Adoption of Animals from Europe.

Reitz, Elizabeth 1993 Evidence for Animal Use at the Missions of Spanish Florida. In The Spanish Missions of La Florida, edited by Bonnie McEwan. pp. 376-398. University of Florida Press, Gainesville, Florida.

Reitz, Elizabeth and Gregory A. Waselkov 2015 Vertebrate Use at Early Colonies on the Southeastern Coasts of Eastern North America. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19(1): 21-45.

Reitz, Elizabeth J., and Elizabeth Wing 2008 Zooarchaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Walter and Anderson 2013 Indigenous Statisitics: A Quantitative Research Methodology. Left Coast Press, Inc, Walnut Creek, California.

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