The Promise and Peril of Older Collections: Meta-Analyses and the Zooarchaeology of Late Prehistoric/Early Historic New Mexico

Abstract

Zooarchaeological meta-analyses hold promise in answering the "big questions" of archaeology, but they are also fraught with methodological peril. In regions with a long history of archaeological research, like the American Southwest, such meta-analyses will invariably involve the use of older collections. These assemblages can pose a challenge for zooarchaeologists: the faunas were often haphazardly and/or inconsistently collected, and documentation of collection methods can be difficult to find (if available at all). In this paper, we illustrate several problems common to older collections using examples from Tijeras Pueblo (LA 581) and Comanche Springs (LA 14904), and explore these issues further through a meta-analysis of the distribution of Old World domestic animal taxa in 17 th century New Mexico. We find that while the inclusion of older collections in zooarchaeological meta-analyses poses challenges, if the problems in these data are addressed, such collections can provide useful information.Keywords: Early colonial period; New Mexico; Old World domestic fauna; Tijeras Pueblo; Comanche Springs; museum collections * University of New Mexico, United States elj@unm.edu, cgabe@unm.edu Jones and Gabe: The Promise and Peril of Older Collections Art. 6, page 2 of 13 and curation rather than differences in the behavior of the humans who initially deposited the fauna. In this paper, we use examples from our research on late prehistoric and early historic faunas of New Mexico and a case study on the distribution of Old World domestic fauna in 17 th century New Mexico to explore issues raised by the inclusion of older collections in archaeozoological meta-analyses. Older collections: issues and impactsWhile every archaeozoological collection's life history is, of course, unique, there are several factors commonly encountered when working with older collections. Here we discuss three of them -variability in screen size, contextual biases, and documentation (or lack thereof) -and then explore when these factors will likely impact results in meta-analyses. Screening (or lack thereof)As has been widely demonstrated, screening protocol during excavation has a profound impact on the composition of zooarchaeological assemblages (Cannon 1999;Nagaoka 2005;Schaffer 1992;Schaffer and Sanchez 1994;Stahl 1996). If not taken into account, variability in screening can easily cause patterns that appear to represent changes in human subsistence behavior, but in fact reflect changes in archaeological practice (Grayson and Cannon 1999; Jones 2013b).Understanding what type of screening was used in excavation is thus critical for any analysis involving older collections. Screening was rare in excavations prior to the late 1960s (see discussion in James 1997). In the American Southwest, the use of quarter-inch mesh became widespread (although not ubiquitous) in the 1970s, and as the influence of screen size on recovery became more wellknown, eighth-inch screens were increasingly used in some (but usually not all) contexts from the lat...

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New Directions in South African Archaeozoology of the Last 2,000 Years

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