Zooarchaeology: Lab

ANTH 2501 (“Zooarchaeology: Lab”) is a hands-on introduction to the specialized analysis of animal bones recovered from archaeological sites and to how these remains can be used to build defensible claims about the past. Students enrolled in ANTH 2501 must also be enrolled in ANTH 2500 (“Zooarchaeology: Lecture”), which serves as a parallel introduction to the principles of zooarchaeological analysis, the basic physiology of the vertebrate skeleton, theories of multispecies archaeology, and the particular roles played by animals in the colonial history of the New Mexico as an extended case study. ANTH 2501, in turn, convenes in the laboratory to provide opportunities to work with actual zooarchaeological artifacts recovered during Barnard’s field program at the site of San Antonio del Embudo, NM. Each student will be assigned an assemblage of bones and will work through the process of collecting and interpreting data on the past animal communities that generated these remains. Students will be briefly introduced to the ceramic, chipped stone, and metal artifacts from the same archaeological context, but our collective focus will be on building datasets to illuminate how animals were herded, hunted, traded, processed, turned into food, and discarded in the American West during the 18th through early 20th centuries