Chapter 11

People, Plants, and Animals in the Past

Outline

• What’s an Archaeofauna?• Studying Plant Remains from

Archaeological Sites• The Symbolic Meaning of Plants:

The Upper Mantaro Valley Project

What’s an Archaeofauna

• An archaeofauna consists of the animal bones recovered from an archaeological site.

• They differ from paleontological assemblages because humans may have had a hand in their formation.

Archaeofauna

• Animal bones turn up in two major archaeological contexts:– At a kill or butchering site, bones may

lie more or less the way they were when the hunters left, affected by carnivore scavenging, weathering, and other natural factors.

– In camps and villages, we find bones where hunted animals were brought back or domesticated animals were butchered.

Identifying Bones

1. Assign each specimen to an element (the anatomical part of the body). Is this bone a rib splinter, part of the pelvis, etc.)

2. Identify the specimens to taxon (kind of animal).

Bison Skeleton Showing Major Elements

Identifying Bones

• number of identified specimens (NISP) -The raw number of identified bones (specimens) per species; a largely outmoded way of comparing archaeological bone frequencies.

• minimum number of individuals (MNI) -The smallest number of individuals necessary to account for all identified bones.

Changing Abundance of Major Animal Groups in

Faunal Remains at Chavín De Huántar

Studying Plant Remains from

Archaeological Sites• A paleoethnobotanist recovers and

identifies plant remains from ancient contexts, focusing on plant–people interactions.– Plant remains are sometimes preserved

in shipwrecks, mudslides, and wells, wattle-and-daub walls, and ceramics.

– Archaeologists also find plant remains in ancient human stomachs and desiccated feces.

Palynology

• The analysis of ancient plant pollen and spores.

• Long been useful to the study of prehistoric ecological adaptations by helping to reconstruct past environments.

Palynology

• Different plants produce pollen that look very different under a microscope.

• The individual grains can be identified and tabulated until the analyst records a statistically significant number, say about 400 to 500 grains per slide.

• The palynologist converts the counts to percentages and creates a pollen diagram that shows the shift in pollen frequencies between stratigraphic levels within a site.

Pollen Diagram From the Lehner Ranch Site (Arizona)

Symbolic Meaning of Plants: The Upper Mantaro Valley

Project• The upper Mantaro Valley sits at 3300

meters above sea level in the central Andes of Peru.

• Paleoethnobotanists Hastorf and Johannessen analyzed the changing patterns of fuel use among the Inka.

• Collecting fuel was an important aspect of Inkan life, consuming up to 4 hours each day for some segments of the population.

Symbolic Meaning of Plants: The Upper Mantaro Valley

Project• The Inka burned quishuar, the wood that

appeared during Wanka III times, in large quantities at festivals and ritually burned human figures carved of quishuar as sacrifices to the divine ancestor of the Inka dynasty.

• Trees were symbolically associated with water, as well as with women, clouds, winter, and the moon.

• Wood had symbolic as well as economic roles, being used to cement social relations (it was important and rare).