Trends and Traditions in Southeastern Zooarchaeology

1. Introduction

· 1 · 1 Introduction Tanya M. Peres The primary goal of archaeology is to interpret past human behaviors based on observations of material culture. Animal remains recovered from the archaeological record aid in the interpretations of ancient resource choices, technological adaptations, cultural continuity, and settlement patterns. In addition, zooarchaeological materials (including bones, teeth, shells, otoliths, scales, scutes, horns, and antlers) reflect environmental conditions that shaped the lives of ancient people, and these materials reveal information about the peoples’ belief systems, social status, food preferences, and taboos. Prior to the last quarter of the twentieth century, animal remains recovered from archaeological sites were often given only passing consideration and rarely subjected to in-depth analysis or interpretation beyond being broadly considered as evidence for dietary preferences. This tradition has altered significantly over the past several decades, thanks in part to an influx of highly trained zooarchaeological analysts, shifting philosophies as to the cultural importance of animal remains, and the advent of new technologies. The interpretation of the archaeological record has become increasingly complex and specialized as new types of biological and spatial data are collected, new methods and techniques of analyses are developed, and the importance of these data are recognized within the scientific community. Collection and analysis of zooarchaeological remains has increasingly become a standard practice for both research and management-oriented archaeological projects, and archaeological interpretations of past lifeways have been greatly advanced through the 2 · Tanya M. Peres consideration of those data. The new trends in zooarchaeology are exemplified by recent work in the American Southeast. The American Southeast is a culture area that has been defined in various ways by archaeologists writing on the region (e.g., Bense 1994; Dickens and Ward 1985; Johnson 1993; Steponaitis 1986; Tushingham et al. 2002). Generally, the Southeast includes the portion of the continental United States bounded geographically to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, the south by the Gulf of Mexico, the west by the Mississippi River, and the north by the Ohio River. The Southeast is divided geologically into several main physiographic regions, consisting of the Coastal Plain (coastal sections of North and South Carolina, southern Georgia, all of Florida, southern and western Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana), Interior Plateau (western Tennessee, western Kentucky, and Arkansas), the Appalachian Highlands (northeastern Alabama, northern Georgia, western South and North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and eastern Kentucky), and Ouachita-Ozark Highlands (northwestern Arkansas), which are further subdivided into provinces based on locality (Fenneman and Johnson 1946; Miller and Robinson 1995). Archaeologists have long understood that a connection exists between environmental setting and human settlement (e.g., Butzer 1982; Osborne 1943) and that environment plays an important role in the histories and cultures of Native American groups that inhabited the region beginning approximately 14,000 years before present (Hudson 1976; Marquardt and Payne 1992; Swanton 1987). Although early ethnographers classified historic indigenous peoples based on language group (Swanton 1987), adaptation to local environments, and relationships to one another (Hudson 1976), recent scholars have begun to construct a holistic social history of pre-Columbian and historic Southeastern Indian groups (e.g., Ethridge and Hudson 2002; Pluckhahn and Ethridge 2006). This has allowed Southeastern archaeology to move past the pre–European contact and post–European contact dichotomous scheme and look at the history of human migrations into, and out of, the Southeast over the past 10,000plus years and what these population movements have meant in terms of inter- and intragroup relationships, economies, social and political organizations , and ideologies. Consequently, the Southeastern culture area is not a monolithic entity but a flexible construct sometimes extended to include indigenous groups inhabiting Texas and the Great Plains, as well Introduction · 3 as the cooler climate areas of the upper Mississippi and Ohio Rivers of the Midwest (e.g., Lankford et al. 2011). Zooarchaeology in the Southeast Southeastern zooarchaeology reached a milestone in 2012 after 50 years as an active research area within the discipline of archaeology. The beginnings of zooarchaeology in the southeastern United States can be traced to 1962 and the completion of Elizabeth Wing’s dissertation work at the University of Florida. That effort, while focused on the Caribbean and more paleontological than anthropological, is important to Southeastern zooarchaeology because of the innovative methodologies that she incorporated . Following her dissertation work, Wing (2003: 12) became a contributor to archaeological projects funded by the National Science Foundation , which led to the formation of the zooarchaeology comparative collection...