Trends and Traditions in Southeastern Zooarchaeology

Preface

Preface The idea for this volume grew out of my teaching and research experiences at the university level. I organized a symposium for the 2010 Southeastern Archaeology Conference to highlight the innovative and interesting research being conducted by zooarchaeologists working in the southeastern United States. All of the original symposium participants were invited to contribute to this volume, and many were enthusiastic to do so. I solicited contributions from other zooarchaeologists who were interested but unable to participate in the symposium. What has resulted is a volume that contains contributions from academics, archaeologists in the public sector , and cultural resource managers. Many of the studies presented in this volume would not have been possible if not for Dr. Wing’s interest in biogeography and history of mammals on Trinidad from the Pleistocene through modern times. While Dr. Wing was working with fauna from the circum-Caribbean Southeast, Dr. Paul Parmalee was doing similar work in the Midwest that would in turn make him an influential figure in southeastern zooarchaeology. Parmalee was trained as a zoologist in wildlife management and began studying animal remains from midwestern archaeological sites at the Illinois State Museum. In 1973 he took a position with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville (UTK), from which he retired as director of the Frank H. McClung Museum of Anthropology in 1989. It is no coincidence that the first two people to study animal remains from archaeological sites in the southeastern United States hold advanced degrees in zoology and biology/ecology/wildlife management. Actually, their educational backgrounds and introduction to archaeological analyses are strikingly similar. Liz Wing holds a graduate degree in zoology,· xiii · xiv · Preface and Paul Parmalee in ecology and wildlife management. Wing was a student at the University of Florida, employed first as a graduate assistant and later as a research associate at the Florida Museum of Natural History . She currently holds the position of curator emerita of environmental archaeology. Parmalee was a student at the University of Illinois and later Texas A&M. After graduation, Parmalee became curator of zoology for the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. Both institutions, as is true of most natural history museums, possess long-standing reputations for collaboration between colleagues in different disciplines. The high-caliber research conducted by Wing and Parmalee over their long careers remains the benchmark for zooarchaeologists across the Southeast. No matter whether one was a student of either of them, their precedent for rigorous data collection and hypothesis testing is the standard by which all zooarchaeology studies in the Southeast are measured. On both theoretical and analytical levels, this volume explores the roles played by animals in economic, social, and ideological realms, as well as their use as proxies in enabling us to better understand the natural and created worlds of the past. ...