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, wattleand-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).