The history and theory of Zooarchaeology

Zooarchaeology as a discipline is the result of a long process that is still ever-changing and evolving today. The zooarchaeological research has two interrelated goals; to understand the biology and ecology of animals across time and space, and to understand the structure and function of the human behaviour. Zooarchaeology uses the remains of the osseous tissues like bone, horn and antlers. Soft tissues like fish scales, cartilage, skin, feathers or muscles might also be used if they are preserved.

One of the first to use what is today zooarchaeology, were John Frere who in 1790 included the bone data from a site in archaeological work. His work went unnoticed and ignored until 1850, when Charles Lyell were influenced by Frere’s work. The Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup excavated in 1843 shell middens in Denmark, and deducted that these middens were not natural and were in fact created by human activities. 

A Southern Quahog (Mercenaria Campechiensis)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant theories were the Environmental Determinism theory, where it was the environment that caused the cultural phenomena, and the culture was viewed as a passive, rather than an active agent. The counterpart to this theory, were the Environmental Possibilism, where the environment might permit certain cultural developments, but there are always cultural alternatives. It was primarily amateurs without formal archaeological training. Archaeologists began developing interest for research that required knowledge of the context and function of the material in the 1940s. Worked specimens and remain would be described in the text, while the unmodified materials would only be mentioned in a brief appendix or note. An increasing number of archaeologist wanted their faunal samples identified by experts, but there were none zooarchaeological expert at that time. Zooarchaeology got an increasingly focus and importance as a field after this. 

It blossomed as a discipline in the 1960s as a field of study in the processual archaology, the “new archaeology” supported by David Clarke and Lewis Binford. Binford did several ethnoarchaeological studies that have helped give an understanding into some of the aspects that is common with zooarchaeology.

There are three facets in today’s modern zooarchaeological research. There is the methodological research, which focuses on the many quantitative and analytical methods in zooarchaeology, the anthropological research, which focuses on the relationship between humans and animals during the course of time, and the biological research, which focuses on work which combines the fields of archaeogenetics and zooarchaeology.

Sheeps are amongst the domesticated animals in which
the aDNA have been compared to the DNA of the modern
day desendants, in order to trace the domestication of them,
and subsequent also the spread of agriculture.  

An example on the use of zooarchaeology can be found when studying how the agriculture spread during the "neolithic revolution". The study of the genetic material in animals associated with agriculture have been examined and the evolution of the domestication of the species have been traced from the Fertile Crecent and towards the Central- and North-Europe, through the Mediterranean basin. 

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Further reading

Reitz, E.J. & Wing, E.S. (2008) Zooarchaeology. Second Edition. New York, Cambridge University Press.