Emery, K.F. (2013) Making the Transition from Zooarchaeological Remains to Animals in a Human Context. In Archaeology of Mesoamerican Animals, edited by C. Götz and K. Emery. Pg.

Chapter 20

ConClusion: from ZooarChaeologiCal remains

to a human Context

Kitty F. Emery

This volume provides perspectives on how the residents of ancient me-soamerica used the animals whose remains we find in archaeological digs. The area studied is both the cultural “core” from northern mexico through northern honduras, as well as the broader cultural and environmental re-gion including the isthmo-Caribbean countries of lower Central america and northern south america. The studies compile fascinating new re-search data and interpretations from many areas and time periods.

But what we all really want to know, both we all who contributed chap-ters or insight, and you who are reading the result, is: how did the meso-american people use and think about the animals with which they shared their landscape? Did they share commonalities of food choice, selection of certain animals as emblems, or values of crafted and traded products? some mesoamerican commonalities are oft-stated (jaguars as symbols of kings, large game as food of the wealthy, shell as adornment of choice, dogs as domesticates). But how well linked are they to the zooarchaeological record, or more importantly, to the people who left the material record? Do these commonalities and differences exemplify culturally separated or shared attitudes among the peoples of the mesoamerican region?

unfortunately, we cannot yet answer those questions, in large part because too few zooarchaeological analyses exist for us to see more than glimpses of the past record. animal assemblages are still too rarely recovered with enough attention to the full assemblage; they are sometimes insufficiently identified, and the zooarchaeological data are still poorly integrated into the archaeological context that must inform their interpretations. The lack of data limits comparison, a lack of attention to the details of assemblages can lead to a broad and conflated view, and limited interpretive collabora-tion between zooarchaeologists and archaeologists can lead to a glossed

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overview of the results (such as this statement: “ancient mesoamericans ate deer and turtles, what else do we need to know?”)

The authors of this volume challenge such long-standing problems and present well-contextualized interpretations based on expert identifica-tions of animal remains that were collected with attention to compre-hensive coverage. Thus, the most important contribution of these many researchers and authors is the highly detailed perspective they provide on the people of mesoamerica and on their decision-making process with regard to the animals. early studies, based as they were on limited datasets and uniform views of a single stratum of society (the elite), and a single type of animal use (for subsistence), tended to emphasize similarities in animal use among the peoples of this diverse region. our more recent studies by contrast reveal variation in animal-use patterns at the levels of social community, households, and even individuals. Variability is seen to be linked to the spatial availability of resources (e.g., gotz and stanton, reniewak et al.) and seasonality (e.g., rodriguez and Valadez), to status level of households (e.g., masson and Peraza, alexander et al., montero) and community (e.g., Peres and Vanderwarker, emery et al.), to the eco-nomics of occupation (e.g., lapham, Balkansky et al., lapham, feinman et al., Carvajal, Valadez et al.) and trade (e.g., Thornton and ng, Cooke et al.), and to the symbolic or emblematic role of animals within (feast-ing) and outside subsistence or local availability (e.g., masson and Peraza, Wing, Corona martínez, navarro, and arroyo Cabrales). While in some ways this variability adds complexity to our interpretations (particularly at the household or individual level where no one dataset is really compa-rable to any other), it provides more realistic, richer, and often surprising interpretations of the human-animal relationship. These new studies re-mind us that animal resources were integrated into a larger economic and political realm that affected decision-making at a level far beyond sub-sistence or basic resources. They force us to recognize that, just as we do ourselves, people of the past made their decisions regarding their animal resources with many different goals in mind. The detailed and insight-ful interpretations presented in this volume argue clearly for integrated zooarchaeological studies that include archaeological context and other material evidence types in interpretation.

When i began this concluding chapter, i thought to summarize the findings and compare the basic similarities and differences across the re-gion. But such an analysis would have required that i again subsume the complexity of people and decision-making into a standardized set of com-

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parisons. although our zooarchaeological database is growing rapidly as these chapters show, we are not yet at a point where we can reveal the true complexity of the human-animal relationship simply on the basis of a few chapters in a book. instead, to reveal the richness of these chapters and the importance of their findings, i take a different approach. i present a series of fictional “vignettes” based on the zooarchaeological and archaeological data presented in this volume. for this unusual move, i beg the indulgence of my readers and the volume authors whose works i have used with such liberty.

in writing the short stories, i hoped to discover, to a very limited extent, the people behind the animal remains, and the motivations behind their varied interactions with animals. The result is perhaps somewhat akin to museum dioramas which, although clearly fictionalized, are perceived as “more real” because they show the material remains “within the context of a living, breathing society populated by actors with complex beliefs, motivations, and socio-political/socio-economic interactions” (quoted by permission from erin Thornton, 2011). as i wrote the stories, though, i also discovered that they highlighted the most important similarities among the research findings of the volume—that procurement strategies were well adapted to local resource availability within a context of season-al and occupational scheduling, but that this local adaptation in no way implied simple opportunistic resource use. in fact, the volume chapters most often reveal specializations in animal acquisition, management, and distribution among householders, community members, and sites. While adaptations were local, resources were clearly obtained through complex networks of exchange that were maintained by, and likely supported, a heterogeneous approach to resource use. as many of these chapters show, the trade of animal products was clearly not isolated to elite exotics; many instances of small-scale exchange of local products are revealed in these pages. attention to detail is essential, however, because local adaptations, local heterogeneity, and local trade of subsistence and domestic resources will be visible only to the researcher who commits to a detailed investiga-tion of household- and community-level differences in animal taxa, body portion, age group, and modified product use.

Mesoamerican People and Animals: Stories through Time

in these vignettes i have taken enormous liberties with the situations although i have tried to stay as close to the data as is possible given that

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these are purely fictional tales. i have placed the stories within the most likely dates as indicated by archaeological record, but have often chosen a specific year to emphasize a point, and of course this is also entirely imaginary. i have used modern cultural, site, and geographic names since we have no idea what these would have been in the past (although as the stories approach and enter contact period, we do have some suggestions from ethnohistoric and historic texts and i’ve drawn on those too).

Oaxacan Highlands, Mixtec, early Late Formative, Tayata

The young newlyweds stood shyly together in front of the marriage banquet in the village of tayata in the mountainous mixteca alta region of oaxaca. she, eldest daughter of the highest elite family of the village (from house 1), was wearing a peccary-tooth necklace and an adorno of armadillo plate to show the links her family held with outlying villages. her cape of turkey and flicker feathers emphasized her status. she held outstretched in her hands a mud-turtle carapace bowl holding the dog figurines she had made to symbolize her union with the house 4 fam-ily. he, eldest son of the wealthy traders from house 4, proudly held out to her a necklace of marine shells procured at great cost by his family from the coast. Presented in celebration by the groom’s family were five fattened dogs, the rare hairless variety now bred in several villages and that her new husband had told her were often part of the exchanges at the coast. The daughter’s family had provided several haunches of white-tailed deer, a stew of cottontail and jackrabbit. each of the newlyweds had presented a whole roasted fish—the bride’s a fat, river fish, the husband’s a salted ocean snapper.

she was both pleased by the status of her new husband, and worried about the work to come with her new position. she was a pottery crafter by choice, though her mother had tried hard to teach her the art of hide working and decoration (she bored so quickly of the endless repair of lithic punches using antler flakers, the sharpening of gopher tooth awls, and the pokings by the river-fish spines). her mother was one of the most sought-after designers and had even worked with her father in the prepa-ration of priestly attire. Would she be able to learn new skills as a dog breeder, understanding how to raise the pups, fatten them, and trade them within and outside their village for the agricultural and forest products her husband would not have time to produce? or would she make her mother proud by learning to combine the art of leatherwork with decora-

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tions using the fabulous coastal shells brought in by her new husband and father-in-law?

(see lapham, Balkansky and amadio for details on the tayata house-holds and the intriguing possibility of low-intensity animal product eco-nomics that may have sustained some families in this village. Valadez et al., this volume, and Valadez azúa, götz, and mendoza españa 2010 also explore the prehistory of the mesoamerican dogs in superb detail.)

Gulf Coast, Middle Formative (500 BCE), Olmec, Tres Zapotes

Behind the main room of a substantial home in tres Zapotes, at an hour somewhat past bedtime, two children sat hidden, listening to their older brother tell of his pilgrimage to the abandoned ruins of san lo-renzo. he described the amazing constructions of san lorenzo on the fertile floodplains of the Coatzocoalcos river 60 km to the southeast. he recounted legends about wealthy residents fighting over the levee lands for corn-growing, the shorelines for access to fish and turtles, and the dogs for sacrifice and ceremony. (he carefully did not glance at the hidden chil-dren as he extolled the virtues of less selfish behavior in their own village. his parents grinned.) Their large valley settlement in the western foothills of the sierra de los tuxtlas had plenty of productive farmland and forests, and many other resources from the nearby swamps, lakes, and rivers of the Papaloapan basin. from the coasts they had marine fish like jack and snapper, and rare goods like manatee bone and sharks’ teeth. in recent generations, feeding their growing number of crafters and administra-tors had required offering alliance and protection to the smaller hamlets nearby who now brought in dried maize, extra fish (salted and dried), and often deer. of course attendants of the tres Zapotes leaders raised dogs too, but primarily for the feasts and ceremonies that strengthened the prestige of the center.

The elder son contrasted this with what he’d seen at rural villages near the Catemaco and Bezuapan rivers. even small villages like la Joya and Bezuapan were growing an abundance of corn from their now ridged fields and beginning to use more efficient grinding stones to process the corn. still, the residents didn’t have access to large animals from estuaries and swamps, or to exotic animals. They ate what they farmed and hunted in their plots and in the managed forests surrounding them, bringing in armadillo, raccoons, rodents, and game birds, and fishing for local slid-ers, mojarra, suckers, and gar. But just as at home, fields grew corn and

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beans while forests provided delicacies like avocado and sapote fruit and achiote spices. oddly, it seemed every household in these small places had dogs scavenging around the houses, and they were eaten as everyday food! stranger still, some of the houses were decorated with hawk, falcon, and woodpecker skins. Were these perhaps traded for the obsidian the la Joya residents were so adept at crafting for exchange with their lo-cal neighbors? The murmuring stories wound on as the children’s eyes drooped closed.

(travelers must surely have moved between villages during this period of growing complexity in settlements and relationships, returning with tales and lessons to share. for details, see Peres, VanDerwarker, and Pool, this volume, and also VanDerwarker 2006 and 2009 on which i drew for thoughts on the subsistence changes that might have been occurring at la Joya and the political changes at tres Zapotes.)

Guatemalan Highlands, Late Preclassic (300 BCE), Maya, Kaminaljuyu

on the edge of the Palangana complex of the rapidly growing capital of Kaminaljuyu in around 300 BCe, the old woman sucked on her toothless gums and grinned at the scene in front of her, pride in the accomplish-ments of her city swelling her ancient chest: so much growth, so much wealth, so much importance. There on the shores of the lake, her grand-son toiled with the others, expanding the vital canals that carried water to the now-irrigated fields. she knew that, as the architect, he was under considerable pressure since the waters had diminished in recent years and green scum more often lined the canals, but she had confidence in his en-gineering abilities. There to the north across the plaza she could see more laborers swarming over the talpetate extension to the acropolis, where the rulers’ new residence would claim, as it were, this important ceremonial/civic space as their own. everywhere, it seemed, there was construction going on. and of course the pace of life was even more frenetic in her own residences in the Palangana since visitors from the soconusco coast were due, sure to bring some large meaty ocean fish like snook, grouper, or snapper to be cooked whole and eaten with the feast—a great coup for their family! Perhaps the visitors would also bring some salt and ceramics that could be displayed with the family wealth. she had no worries about their own display and chuckled to think of her retainers pinching her own poor dogs to ensure they were well enough fleshed (corn-fed), coats gleaming, nails polished, for the sacrifice in the upper plaza, and the feast

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in the lower plaza afterwards. so much effort went into those pups to be sure they’d represent the wealth and prestige of the family when the right moment came! she wondered what else her daughter-in-law planned to have prepared in the large communal cooking hearths—maybe animals tithed from the fishers and hunters of the mirador low-houses on the outskirts: slider turtles, gadwall duck, and cichlid fishes from the lake (or perhaps one of the gar that had recently been brought in from the older canals); maybe pocket gopher, or armadillo trapped in the open grassy edges of the surrounding fields or some of the increasingly common rab-bits and bobwhite quail; one of the deer occasionally brought in from the carefully managed forests nearby (whose wild plants provided fruits and wood, herbs, and medicines); or perhaps even tapir from the cloud forest some distance in the hills. she hardly even remembered the taste of tapir; even the low-family hunters didn’t seem to have time away from the city to get those anymore. she gazed past the busy scene up to the surround-ing hillsides and volcanic peaks beyond, reflecting on the changes she’d seen in her lifetime alone as the city grew in size, prestige, and power.

(see emery et al. for more information.)

Central Pacific Panama, 200 CE, Vampiros Rockshelter

on the intertidal flats at the mouth of a river on the central Pacific coast of Panama, a tired middle-aged woman rebalanced the heavy basket of sea-catfish, croaker, and whitefin weakfish and hefted the sleeping baby on her back, glancing back at her other grandchildren. They were chatter-ing happily, dragging baskets of fresh snails and clams toward the rock-shelter, arguing about who had scooped the youngest and tenderest grand arks, the most moon snails (gathered by the fistful) or the most tenacious rock snail (pried off the mangrove roots with stone axes), and bragging of an elusive Pacific calico scallop, a favorite of the grandfathers. The smell of fish drifted out of the shelter where yesterday’s catch, now split, decapi-tated, or otherwise prepared, were smoking over the smudge fires for trade to the inland sites. she was glad they’d had a snack of corn and manioc cake! hurrying toward her spot in the second rockshelter where other fish and shrimp were being salted and dried, her pelican and cormorant bone beads clinked briskly against her Conus tinkler. she wished she still had the enthusiasm of the children, but every year it seemed more difficult to find enough of her favorite mussels, the walk along the strand seemed further, more muck than sand under her feet, the mangrove thicker, and

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the water off the coast less clear. all she could find nowadays were venus clam, littleneck, and moon snails, certainly the men brought back fewer green jack, bonefish, or needlefish than they had before. still, the fish harvest was especially worth the trip now that pufferfish meat was in such demand. men of her family were still out on the waters pulling in the fine cotton gill nets with catches of shoaling fish like Pacific moonfish for the evening. maybe one of them might have had the luck to also find a sea turtle in one of their traps, or a big iguana lazing by the shore, even some crabs to throw in the ceramic cook pot for a change.

(more details about these fascinating specialized preparation locations can be found in Carvajal Contreras 2010; Carvajal, this volume; and Cooke et al., this volume [regarding the birds of the site]. i have placed the timing at the end of the occupation to allow reflection backward on changes occurring through time, though perhaps not in a single lifetime.)

Valley of Mexico, 600 CE, Teotihuacan

in the teopancazco barrio in the southeastern part of the enormous city of teotihuacan, sometime in the rainy season, platters full of whole bobo mullet along with smaller platters of red snapper, snook, and mojarra were being carried through the streets in a fabulous procession celebrating agricultural bounty and marine fertility. an elderly teopancazco priest shifted his heavy processional crocodile cape, a symbolic link with the richness of the Veracruz coast, decorated with blue-purple dye from the rare Pacific sea urchin to emphasize the leathery ridged skin symbolic of the milpa earth, furrowed and mounded with planting. The decorations rattled against his cape: bull shark and barracuda teeth and red and blue crab pinchers, all also from the gulf Coast. The fishes had been caught by the teotihuacan enclave fisherfolk in the estuarine lagoons of northern Veracruz, who netted massive catches of spawning mullet along with the large snappers, snook, and groupers that moved inshore to feed. a yearly event, the appearance of the mullets swarming down with the turbid rain-fed river-waters into the estuaries to spawn was celebrated in both fish-ing villages and in the capital cities inland where the fish were eaten as a wonderful delicacy linked to the harvest and bounty of the season.

The priest could also see an elegant high-ranking administrator over-seeing the festivities, decked out in quetzal feathers and a jaguar pelt from the lowlands, obsidian flints from the highlands, and marine shells from both coasts. The priest knew that this official’s presence emphasized the

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importance of the annual event for more than a feast of plenty since the links between fish and corn emphasized coast and inland, teotihuacan and its coastal enclaves and trading partners. ahead he could just see the head priest offering oratory and song as he marched in his cape decorated with symbols of water waves and starfish, sea shells sewn in patterns across the hems. The fish, some as fillets or baked heads, but others complete, had been smoked (cooked over embers), salted, or sun-dried by the village fishers to preserve them for the procession and feasting. The fish would be shared through the barrio, some more fabulous animals presented sym-bolically at the temple and in the central patio, others consumed and de-posited in the various households of the barrio, especially the important residences behind the temple and in the northwestern sector.

(see rodriguez and Valadez, this volume, and also rodriguez 2010. Cruz [1987] reports the movement of bobo mullet into coastal lagoons at the height of the rainy season precipitation when they ride the turbid rivers down to spawn and then move quickly back upstream. [Peak river height in Veracruz is likely to have been in september and october at the end of the rains although rodríguez and Valadez suggest a slightly later date of January through march for spawning.])

Chiapas, 650 CE, Maya, Chinikiha

laboring behind the palace of the large site of Chinikiha, sometime in the Classic period, a young woman grumbled at the heat and stench. her grumbling was quiet however, so as not to attract attention from the royal attendants and priests watching her progress. last night’s feast had been well attended and the ceremonies exciting, with sacrifices and offerings to gods and nobility alike. Visitors had come from as far away as the gulf of mexico Plain and the usumacinta river. The floor was littered with food detritus (including bone, shell, and ceramic serving plates and vases) and the offering tables were still groaning under the weight of uneaten meat. her job was to carefully remove the carcasses and food remnants to the waste piles that lined the narrow, restricted corridor behind the palace. There the offerings would be enumerated, evaluated, and sanctified by the king’s priests who, the woman reflected, apparently have no sense of smell. skins of many animals had been removed during the offering ceremonies for use in later rites, as had been the crania of most of the deer.

she carefully shifted the pile of butchered deer meat, much of it with bones still within, brought as offerings by high-ranking guests and pre-

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pared by the palace servants for immediate sharing and later distribution to the royal dining table, into carrying baskets that she hefted onto her head and carefully placed into the waste area. “Why i take such care i’ll never know,” she hissed under her breath, “…when the royal dogs are given free rein in here, tossing everything everywhere. my own children would do a better job disposing of such offal … and frankly of butcher-ing, … look at the cut marks the priests have left all over these bones, shameful!” she returned to gather a veritable zoo of smaller carcasses from brocket deer, dog, raccoon, rabbit, and turtles, offered to various deities during the celebrations, handling each of these smaller corpses with equal deference, knowing that each represented some important political rela-tionship, ceremonial symbol, or calendrical rite.

(see montero lópez, this volume and other articles [montero lópez 2009; montero lópez et al. 2011]. in this vignette i suggest that the remains of some rituals might have been treated as sacred trash [Walker 1995], curated for viewing, or as offerings. This would allow them to re-main as material evidence of such activities for us to recover [unlike nor-mal animal trash which is discarded elsewhere; unpublished research by emery and Brown; hayden and Cannon 1983].)

Honduras, A. D. 750, Maya, Copán

sometime in the latter years of the late Classic, at the site of Copán in honduras, in an auspicious haab month of tzotz (sotz’, bat), a royal scribe in the noble residence of 9n-8 in the sepulturas area dipped his bone-handled paintbrush into the pigment in his marine-shell paint pot and carefully detailed the leaf nose and tragus of the Copán city emblem glyph, the fruit bat. he writes his missive regarding prophecies for trouble brewing in the east and emphasizes the danger by referencing the tzina-cantli (bat of the east), the Copán tzotzi ha (bat house—structure 10l-20—part of the legacy of 18 rabbit, whose reign ended in ignomious defeat by Quirigua), and the story of the hero twin’s xibalbá battle with Camazotz (the bat of death, also a leaf-nosed but with vampire-bat ten-dencies to sacrifice and nocturnal bloodletting). at the end of the docu-ment, he signs his work, beginning with the glyph of yet another bat’s head in profile meaning “the writing of,” signature of a scribe. his knowl-edge of bat behavior, taxonomy, and symbolism was as important as his artistry in his writing, and his royal status in emphasizing the importance of his words.

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(see navarro and arroyo-Cabrales this volume, figures 10 and 11 for a discussion of this epigraphy and iconography. for a full rendering of the Popol Vuh, see recinos 1952. i have relied on inomata 1997, 2008 for a description of structures where elite goods, paintbrushes, shell paint-pots, and pigment grinders clarify the animal-related crafting toolkit used by maya scribes. for a description of the sepulturas houses and the Bat house, see fash 2001:129; martin and grube 2008.)

Oaxacan highlands, 850 CE, Zapotec, Mitla Fortress

a furious gobbling sound filled the air on the terrace patio in the Zapo-tec site of mitla fortress around the year 850 Ce. With a delighted laugh, the young girl pulled her baby brother even closer to the pole enclosure holding the turkeys where he could also see the fluffy babies just hatched yesterday and now tumbling after the hen and away from the angry cock. The pen held several turkey hens, a cock, young pullets in various stages (and also a montezuma quail, captured and held here until its date with the cooking fire). The children’s mother glanced up from her work pre-paring the skins their father had brought in—hooded skunk, long-tailed weasel—both beautiful and lustrous. in combination, perhaps they’d be a fair exchange for the barred-owl feathers she was hoping to have for her festival cape, but she worried so about his hunting expeditions in search of the now-elusive deer into the dangerous outskirts where war parties regu-larly skirmished. she hoped the turkeys would produce enough pullets to satisfy him that they had enough with these and what he could hunt safely near his fields. surely their meat, feathers, or even eggs could be traded for dogs from ejutla or other goods, and she’d turned out quite nice bone tools and ornaments from their fine, thick leg bones. finally the toddler tired of the playful chicks and wandered away to look for the squirrel they had tied to a housepost as a new family pet. she yelled at them to stay away from the medicinal mud-turtle shells and opossum tail hanging in the smoke of the kitchen cookfire. The young mother knew that if the turkeys didn’t work out, she could also try her hand at raising dogs, but they didn’t have the status for her to even think of raising rabbits, whose fur and meat were so much used by the rich residents especially at el Palmillo. That village, famed for its maguey, claimed the rabbit as symbol, the association well known between rabbit and pulque, the rabbit fur used in textiles, as was the fiber of the plant, and both used as food.

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(see lapham, feinman, and nichols, this volume for more information on this and other wonderfully documented assemblages from the Zapotec highlands. my suggestion that the mud-turtle and opossum may have been medicinals is not based on the archaeological evidence from this site where they may have been food, bowls, or drums. however, ethnographic evidence of medicinal uses reminds us not to ignore these alternative in-terpretations in our often “food”-based discussions [Carr 1991; emery 2011].)

Northern Yucatán, 950 CE, Maya, Isla Cilvituk

“nag, nag, nag . . . and when i’m exhausted from the milpa! she didn’t have to canoe across the lake, hike two km, check the traps, repair a terrace wall, anD gut and carry a deer back again (lucky kill that one though—otherwise i’d have been bringing back paca again).” The tired and grumpy young husband sat and glowered at the equally exhausted young wife an-grily stirring a pot of river turtle and apple-snail stew in a small residence on a lowlying terrace in the northernmost ward of the Postclassic com-munity of isla Cilvituk.

she groused as she stirred, “you need to spend more time on fishing or hunting now that the meat is worth so much more at market. or maybe bring in some of the valuable hardwoods that the traders are shipping up the coast. Then we could get some shell beads to decorate the leatherwork, get a better trade for it that way.” They’d been over this so often, and he had to admit she was doing her share by tending the kitchen-garden, and raising the turkey chicks he brought home a while back, and even now fattening up some peccary young in the little house. But surely she could share more of those jobs with her sisters and cousins? his milpa across the lake was tiny, so even to produce enough to feed them, he’d had to dedi-cate time into building terraces, working with the ward men in return for help on their plots. and hunting, though not bad around his small milpa, especially with his dogs, was best in the swamps, another long distance south or west. hardwoods too were best found out there, too far to be re-ally feasible unless with a big group, and that meant sharing the proceeds. But his complaints were likely to be greeted with a list of her own duties: gathering eggs, cleaning turkey pens and bee hives out in the furthest gar-den where they were out of the way of the community; packaging honey, wax, and turkey feathers for market day; sweeping patio and communal platform; carting off animal bones and other rich organic trash to the

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house garden, or sometimes as far as the lake (for turtle bones and snail shells); shooing the peccary again out of the main house; putting more masa in with the turtles and snails to keep them fresh for tomorrow’s market, not to mention butchering his deer to roast the meat and stretch the hide. hmm . . . maybe he’d better offer to make a few more leather awls out of the deer femur and tibia to smooth things over a bit.

outside, leaning contentedly against a neighboring wall in the same patio group, the elder woman chuckled to hear the quarrel, thinking how much more difficult the scheduling would all get when this newlywed couple also had children.

(see alexander et al., this volume, for an insightful discussion of isla Cilvituk and household ecology. The findings of this site clearly illustrate the complexity of resource scheduling, which are also in evidence in the chapter by götz and stanton.)

Northwest Mexico, 1000 CE, Chalpa

on the shore of the Pacific coast marismas nacionales estuary some-where around 1000 Ce, perhaps even on the tenth day of the twenty-day calendar, the day of the dog, a young girl stood and watched in awe as her grandfather’s body, seated and wrapped, was carried on its funerary pallet to the waiting opening in the earthen burial mound. her grandfather’s importance in the village was emphasized by the deer skull and water-bird feather adornments of the pallet and the dog and raccoon companions chosen to cross to the spirit world with him. The dead dogs, spotted pelts gleaming, were posed with their muzzles high and their rictused lips gri-macing over human-like, flat teeth reminding the child of the fat clay dog figurines she’d seen in displayed at her grandfather’s home one day, not at all like those of the puppies she played with at home, nor her father’s large hunting dogs (whose images she loved to carve onto her mother’s new, wet, spindle whorls), or even the fat little dogs she so enjoyed eating on special occasions. The raccoons, like little dogs, were equally haunting with their glossy black masks. Despite herself, the girl felt a combina-tion of sadness in the passing of her grandfather, pride in her relationship to this important ancestor, and excitement about the feast to come—the heaped ceramic pots of turtle, rabbit, and turkey stew; roasted deer, iguana, and armadillo; fried tiny herring and threadfin she’d helped catch with a net; baked sea catfish, snappers, and snook her father had caught by hook the day before; and the endless steamed oysters that smelled so tempting.

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(see Wing, this volume for the details of dog and other remains from burial mounds at the marismas nacionales sites; Valadez et al. this vol-ume for thoughts on the different breeds that might be represented by the marismas dogs. needless to say we do not know how the marismas ani-mals might have been prepared as foods [Coe 1994] or how they might have been presented as offerings to accompany the dead [although for a fascinating reconstruction of a dog burial, see Draper 2010].)

Northern Yucatán, 1250 CE, Champotón

The aging trader eased his heavy basket down off the tumpline and heaved a sigh of relief as he looked around at the bustling central plaza of Champotón, an important trade center on the western shore of the Yucatán. a refreshing sea breeze blew, and the smell of fish, sand, and salt made him think longingly of a soft sleeping mat on the beach and time to enjoy it. at least he was sure he’d get a good exchange for his cargo of deer and peccary, especially the tiny brocket deer whose meat was so fatty. This particular load had come from the remarkable city of Chichén itzá some 95 km from the northern coast of the peninsula—the hunters there had made a special effort to stock up the dried meat for his arrival.

here at the coast, he hoped to pick up some salted catfish, snook, grou-per, and snapper, all fished from the shorelines, vast shallows, and estuaries by the local experts. he might also trade some of his inland products for seal or ray meat, but he’d already stocked up on loggerhead, green, and hawksbill turtle as well as shark meats at xcambó where they specialized in those products. The salted and dried meats found somewhat limited favor among the inland residents despite the delicious flavor (in his opin-ion). But the sea-turtle shell (tortoise shell), manatee bone, and feathers from the various marine birds were in demand for special ceremonies and arts and always fetched a high price. There was likely to be a particular demand at Chichén itzá for ceremonial products since the patriarch of one of the highest ranking families had been taken ill with what seemed a wasting disease. rumor had it that he would be buried in the osario along with many of the animals he so enjoyed hunting for food and skins (deer, turkey, iguana, opossum, jaguarondi, rabbit, bright colored birds, and snakes). he planned to hurry back that way just in case though he felt somewhat like a vulture hovering in anticipation of a death.

at any rate, he was lucky that the boneless meat, tortoise-shell, and feathers from these coastal villages were light-weight packages for the

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return trip inland because he also hoped to acquire salt, marine shell, and some of the famed Champotón, domestic turkey pullets. The pullets would be an experiment—they were being successfully bred in captivity at Champotón and the inland dwellers especially of Dzibilchaltun were eager to learn since captive breeding was never very successful with the otherwise easily managed ocellated turkeys. That was his next destination and he hoped he’d keep them alive for the trip.

he wondered to himself over the changes he’d seen in his lifetime—in-cluding the current interest in raising deer, maybe even breeding turkeys. land was limited now, he knew, and the old-timer focus on a balanced milpa providing both plant and animal food and resources might not lon-ger be in favor. at least here on the coast where the fishermen still plied their trade with just as much attention to the best fishing spots for the various species, fish would never disappear. ah, he sighed, the servants of the noble household of group 5 had noticed his arrival, his brief reprieve was over, his trader’s spiel already unrolling in his head as he brought his wares nearer. This family was particularly fond of cochinita pibil (of pec-cary), so that would be the first product he’d bring out.

(see gotz, this volume, and his many other works in the area [götz 2006, 2008a, 2008b, in press]. also see various works by masson describ-ing contemporaneous practices at mayapán [this volume]. in this vignette i have emphasized several products that might never be recovered in the archaeological record since the lack of zooarchaeological remains is not always evidence of their lack in a traders’ basket.)

Northern Yucatán, 1350 CE, Mayapán

The tired student shifted on the hard, stone bench, willing his mind to focus on the calendrical almanac in front of him. Would he ever be competent to calculate the annual progressions of rites, let alone be able to conduct them? his family, one of the confederate of governing lineages at mayapán, was relying on him to take his place among the priestly elite and solidify the family position as leaders among the government. With a frustrated sigh he stood and stretched, turning to gaze out between the decorated columns of the Q-163 educational and council hall built originally under the aegis of his lineage fathers. he looked toward the massive Q-162 temple of Kukulkan (feathered serpent), symbolic cen-ter of mayapán and of the universe: the temple and its serpent-sculpted columns reached toward the sky, the deep adjacent Cenote Ch’en mul

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provided passage to the underworld, and the underground passageway known only to the priesthood linked this structure to the Q-152 templo redondo where Kukulkan was revered in his guise of the wind god (the bird-masked ehecatl). Both underground passageways were guarded by the many dogs sacrificed at their entrances at propitious calendrical mo-ments … which dates were those?

he sighed again. he always confused the annual cycle of dog sacrifice with that of the famous mayapán deer. During those events the priest-hood cached deer skull parts along the southern base of the Kukulcan temple (and feasted on deer in the adjacent Q-153 temple) to cyclically reestablish this sacred location as center—but also to emphasize the deer, one of the economic cornerstones of the city. The women of several elite mayapán families oversaw the raising of these deer, usually captured as fawns and nurtured to a harvesting age of two to three years, in the pens and corrals that also held flocks of hand-raised turkeys (and, in the case of at least two households, r-116 and Y-43, rabbits) adjacent to their houselots. Deer meat, bones, and hides were much sought after. of course, both of these events were also muddled in his mind with the new Year cycle of food (often tamale) offerings of these animals and others to the various calendric directions. The only one of those he remembered clearly right now was the iguana to the west since the neighboring council hall complex Q-72 had recently brought in a huge number of them, for what purpose he wasn’t sure.

But today he had to focus on learning the ceremony of the templo del Pescador where Kukulkan, with shell on his chest, was shown defeating the fierce crocodilian water monster (tlatecuhtli) and the sharks of the seas. it was almost the season for this ritual that was so valued as a cel-ebration of the economic flow of husbanded deer and turkey to the coast in return for salted marine fish, shells, and salt. as with most ceremonies, the pescador rites involved the preparation of special foods, including the meat of deer, turkey, and iguana, sometimes the dog and brocket meat only consumed only at such feasts, and in honor of the pescador rites, shark meat as well. much of this feast food was provided by (and often consumed at) the households of the templo redondo complex where the kitchens prepared a diversity of brocket deer, peccary, fish, turkey, turtle, gopher, and dog, which they raised there. his stomach growled and he wondered when the evening meal for his fellow students would arrive, prepared, served, and cleared away to be discarded elsewhere by the at-tendants.

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of course some rites were not commanded by the annual cycles of sun and production, but by the cycle of life itself. he thought of the royal buri-al at temple Q-95 shortly after his schooling began—attendants from house Q-92 had carried bound, hand-raised animals up the stairs of the temple where the priests sacrificed them on the tapered stone alongside selected slaves. a great portion of manatee was also ceremoniously carried up by the head of the Q-54 council hall lineage—a lineage with great in-terest in unusual animals and strange pets, such as porcupine, grison, and ringtail. The slaughtered carcasses and manatee meat joined other animal products (tapir paws from the lineage of Q-64, and puma and jaguar skins with claws intact from the lineage of Q-70, he thought), all tossed into the burial shaft, sent as attendants, adornments, companions, and nour-ishment for the journey to the afterlife. not all burials were so elaborate but most included at least a deer companion, and he thought sadly of the small children who had recently died of fever at house Q-39, each sent to the afterlife with a deer vertebra. and therein was his real role he felt, to understand and assist families as they traveled through this complicated cycle of life. With a final sigh, he returned to his studies.

(see masson and Peraza this volume and elsewhere, especially 2008 for a discussion of deer raising and masson 1999 for a related study at la-guna de on and Brown and emery 2008 for modern examples of animal-bone caching. The questions of deer husbandry and coastal-inland trade are widely debated. for discussion, see C. D. White et al., 2004; Carr 1985; and götz 2006, and this volume, but the evidence from mayapán and elsewhere is indeed suggestive of such activities alongside turkey do-mestication and the trade of fish.)

Pacific Panama, 1514 CE, Cerro Juan Diaz

The teenager shouted from where he stood near the Cerro Juan Diaz aviaries. The merchant’s canoes headed upriver from the coast, surrounded by the local one-hulled dugouts laden with fish and boobies from the intertidal waters. The merchant was famed for his trade in birds and feath-ers; he’d even carried macaws, parrots, and mockingbirds to the northern kingdom of tenochtitlan. The boy’s father abandoned the unusual nazca booby-bone tubes he was working for trade to nearby sitio Conte, and joined him for a final round of the chief ’s bird cages. he passed their own coops with young crested bobwhites, wild whistling-duck chicks, doves, and some noisy chachalacas. Their muscovy ducks, bred and raised in the

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village, wandered freely. But here in the chief ’s aviaries, the special birds were destined for the trader’s baskets. to one side were the curassow and the crested guan from the western forests; beside them the blue-headed and yellow-crowned amazons, orange-chinned and brown-throated para-keets, and the special crimson-fronted parakeet and scarlet macaw (from local traders); a flurry of colorful birds chirruped in the central cage; at the other end were black hawks from the coast, roadside hawks from the forest edges, and various falcons from the savannas, forest cliff nests, and river-edge forests. The boy was particularly attached to several that he’d captured and raised. of the owls, his favorite was the little pygmy with its medicinally powerful feathers, but he also admired the barn, striped, and spectacled owls. skins and baskets of feathers from other birds were laid out in readiness: scavenging caracaras and vultures, water birds like the white ibis, great egret, woodstork, and roseate spoon-bill, and the remark-able pale-billed woodpecker skin brought from the western forests. little dowitchers, willets, and sandpipers, larger jacanas, gallinules, coots, and various ducks had all been brought in by the hunters from the shore to be served as part of the inevitable feasting to celebrate the merchant trader. The gulls, cormorants, pelicans, and enormous frigate birds were to be some unusual dishes. The boy loved the pursuit of the birds (the dangers of cliff climbing, avoiding the warriors of the neighboring chiefdoms), helping to raise the birds and learning their habits from his father, watch-ing his mother craft their feathers and skins, and work hawk, osprey, and other claws into amulets. he even preferred the birds to the shell working of his friend’s family (although they traded shells from as far as the Carib-bean coasts), and it was certainly better than the life of a common fisher!

(see Cooke et al., this volume, for details on the birds of this area. i’ve also drawn on Jiménez and Cooke 2001 for more on the fishing, on Cooke and ranere 1989 for more on hunting, and for general information, on Cooke et al. 2007. for more information on birds, in this case from the mexica area, see Corona-martínez, this volume.)

Basin of Mexico, 1520 CE, Lake Texcoco

in the vast urban sprawl of tlatelco, a middle-aged mexica woman sat in the busy market surrounded by colorful birds in ornately woven crates and baskets. her position was enviable, a central spot guarded by the gen-erations of bird-sellers of her family. her stands were located only a few minutes away from the amatlan featherworkers’ guild often visited by

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the servants of the wealthy in search of a broad round fan or headdress of brilliant tropical bird feathers woven on delicate reed and wood frames. a tall open-work cage standing tall in their space displayed the beautiful colors of their fledgling raised macaws and parrots so preferred by the artisans. occasionally they would sell an eagle for its plumes, and often sold bunches of the now-popular tail plumes of the boat-tailed grackle.

her family’s stall wasn’t far either from the herbs and potions of the medical guild—customers knew to come to the bird-sellers for special cures. her enviable collection of bird gastroliths alone included those from the hunted water birds, great egret and night heron, ducks and mer-gansers, but also, for other uses, from the captive-raised barn owl and eagles, and even the great-tailed grackle, cowbird, and tiny varied bunting. for dandruff she had the bile of the spotted sandpiper; the bile of the common crow was known to solve the discomfort of genital warts; and of course a plaster of excrement and ashed feathers from the turkey vulture was a wonderful depilatory. for edema she recommended powdered meat of the woodpecker. for the attacks of epilepsy, the best cure was fresh or powdered meat and liver of the hummingbird, though meat of the king vulture was also curative. to dispel jealousy and sadness, the meat and bladder of a mourning dove; for headache, smoke from the red feathers of the golden fronted woodpecker. of course many of their birds were destined for the stew-pot and her oldest daughter called out the names of those birds to the passing throngs: “We have turkeys, we have curassow; we have quail, pigeons, and doves to roast; we have sparrows and buntings for stew … looking for a special treat? We have toucan and woodpecker fresh from the woods!”

Beside her were the brightly colored perching birds and songbirds sought to brighten a household, charm a tired oldster, or perhaps, in the case of the parakeets and parrots, to amuse with their human-like capacity for speech. The bright and cheery goldfinches, painted buntings, house-finch, and cedar waxwing would add color to any home. The curve-billed thrasher and the song sparrow delighted with their intricate songs; the northern mocking bird amazed with its mimicry. her younger children were taught early to find the nests of these little birds and collect their eggs and fledglings to raise with careful hand-feeding and nurturing in their home before bringing them for sale to market. so easy to raise, and unlike for the lovely larger birds that took years of loving care to bring to adulthood, there was never time to get attached to these bright little puffs of color and music.

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(This scene is based on Corona-martínez, this volume, and his other excellent works on the zooarchaeological and ethnohistoric literature on birds [Corona martínez 1997, 2002, 2008a]. for additional information on domestication in the new World see, e.g., Valadez azúa 2003.)

Greater Nicoya, 1550 CE, San Cristóbal

“truly, this is mohammed’s Paradise,” thought the old soldier gazing in amazement at the welter of people and chaos of activity at the shore of the lake (lake managua). The noise was overwhelming as one shouting group yanked in woven henequen dragnets weighted with notched ceramics, scooping up large inshore catfish and gar and tossing them further up the beach to others who dispatched them efficiently and layered them with salt in baskets. a cluster of naked children yelled in excitement from the shallows where they enthusiastically plucked jute snails from the rocks or apple snails from the reeds along the shore. fishing boats were returning from further forays (some even reportedly from overnight trips 45 kms to the coast for jacks fished with the superb bone hooks crafted in this village) revealed heaps of large bony fish (cichlids), small shoreline turtles (sliders and mud turtles), and a couple of fat iguanas. finally, baskets and bags were hefted up for the short walk to the village. he’d even heard tell of poisons cast into the waters to make fish rise by the hundreds, and drives of deer so thick the animals were speared as they ran by!

The old soldier’s mouth started to water as he thought of the meal to come—when he’d left earlier, women were already grinding the dried corn, stirring pots of fish soup for later straining through ceramic colan-ders, and mincing fresh bone marrow with bits of stored dried deer and fish meat. he looked forward to the promise of palm-oil fried fish served with sweet orange potatoes and passionfruit, roast meat from the tiny deer (brocket) and armadillo the hunters had trapped in snares and pits over-night in the fields, and maybe even some turkey stew if the bow-hunters had been lucky … though more likely one of the fat, grain pests (agouti, paca, rice rat). he knew that, with some sixty pole and thatch houses perched up on their earthen and stone platforms, there were already many mouths to feed without their group, but clearly the bountiful fresh and stored resources meant that their arrival wouldn’t cause undue hardship.

(This vignette is placed at the point of initial contact although the san Cristobal assemblage actually spans many centuries. The view that first inspired the mohammed’s Paradise moniker might easily have been the

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same as it had been for several hundred years before. see reniewak et al., this volume for more specifics on san Cristobal. for information on santa isabel, see work by mcCafferty [2008] and for the rivas region, Pohl and healy [1980].)

Southern Maya Lowlands, 1920s, Maya/British, Holotunich

at the site of holotunich in the early-twentieth century, the head cook and bottle-washer bundled up the day’s trash from the logging company camp manager’s wooden building and dragged it to the refuse barrel a few meters down the slope where he dumped empty food cans, jars, fish, turtle, pig, and deer bones atop the pile with a couple of random jute shells probably tossed in by some snacking logger. as he shuffled back along the path, tossing an old corn cob to the lazy mule tied nearby (mentally threatening to dump his old bones in the trash heap next), he kicked at the accumulation of “old garbage” from the san Pedro maya residents who lived on this spot some 30 years back before they were forcibly re-moved by the BeC. The garbage lying around clearly showed their pref-erence for wild game, fish, and those unappetizing river snails. he knew that back then, just as today, their maya workers weren’t shy about accept-ing pig meat, machetes, and cooking pots in return for some local foods. With his high rank as kitchen staff, he’d enjoyed his share of the produce from the maya gardens and the occasional wild game like peccary, deer, or armadillo. But why on earth, he wondered, had they eaten snails and paca (a giant rat for heaven sake …). Probably flaunting their short-lived independence and their ridiculous attempts to charge rent for logging this land! he’d heard that at some villages, the residents refused all British animals, harrumph, needed to take a lesson from those up further north where they actually raised pigs and fowl as taxes. now he, on the other hand, was happy to purchase his “seven pounds of flour and six pounds of salted pork” every week (along with liquor, liver tonic, and some pickled beef since the cows around the logging camp were not for eating). he’d even taken up hunting and fishing himself—sell some good fish and turtle from the nearby lagoon, and a bit of venison and maybe someday he could pay back the debts incurred by the cost of his food, liquor, tools, and shot, and bring his family out to live with him, maybe help him raise a few pigs.

(see Thornton and ng-Cackler, this volume, for a full description of the san Pedro maya and British occupations of holotunich, Belize. also see

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citations in that chapter to information on neighboring san Pedro siris and the more distant Yucatán Colonial and historic sites.)

Discussion

so who then are the ancient people of mesomerica? They are just like us, distracted mothers, excited children, harried husbands, proud grand-mothers, tired grandfathers. They are farmers and crafters, warriors and administrators, specialists and generalists. each is motivated by the daily needs of a family and an occupation, by the requirements of scheduling, cooperating, socializing, learning, and living. and what are the animals with which they interact? Their foods, their craft materials, their pets, their totems, their medicines, their decorations, their source of pride, their source of worry. The ancient mesoamericans did not “eat deer and turtles, end of story.” They lived a complex lives within which animals played an intrinsic role that can only be understood by the compilation of such ex-cellent data and interpretations as are provided in this volume.

The themes that became most clear to me as i wrote these vignettes in-clude: 1) the important role of animal-related occupational specialization both in subsistence and crafting pursuits; 2) the frequency of management of animals within and near the households and the economics associated with this animal management including processing and exchange (most of which was likely done by women); 3) the heterogeneity in resource de-cision-making within and sometimes between households and communi-ties; 4) and the overlap across mesoamerica in terms of the meanings of the various animals and habitats for mesoamerican peoples, indicative likely of a close cultural connectivity across the entire region. likely i have specifically emphasized these themes as a result of the findings of the researchers in this volume. i believe, however, that they are supported by the data and are therefore worthy of much more consideration in future research.

The chapters of this volume in combination stress that food animals were primarily procured from the immediate surroundings and often us-ing techniques specifically appropriate to the nearby habitats, particu-larly the use of combined forest/field management and garden hunting (see, e.g., götz and stanton’s discussion of coastal vs. inland procurement strategies; the study by Peres, VanDerwarker, and Pool of variation in resources among sites of different political and economic statures; and

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the fascinating specialized fish- and mollusc-processing Vampiros rock-shelters by Carvajal). But these chapters also show that there was much more specialization in the acquisition of animals than is often reflected in our broader site-level studies. This includes specialized hunting/fish-ing/shelling; selective dog rearing and breeding; domestication of tur-keys, ducks, and possibly rabbits; and the household raising of wild-born birds, raccoons, and possibly deer. That these activities might be special-ized at the community level (Panamanian fishers/shellers trading with inland groups, marine products and possibly dogs traveling from coast to highland oaxaca and guatemala), at the status level (dogs, turkeys, and rabbits in addition to more common “status” species such as wild cats), and at the household level (raising rabbits and turkey in oaxaca, birds in pre-Colonial mexico) is also more evident than we might have expected. These most recent studies do not indicate domestication of animals at the scale seen in the old World, but as more zooarchaeological studies are done and with greater attention to detail, it is becoming clear that low-level or household specialization was the norm even in the procurement of animals.

This finding extends to the additional recognition that trade and ex-change was much more extensive and frequent than we had predicted. most of these chapters reveal trade at a regional if not extra-regional level, and not just trade of high status “exotics” but also of local species, or of species that would have been available to neighboring villages or locations a few days away. This point accords well with recent isotopic research by erin Thornton (2011) that even the most ubiquitous fauna such as deer and peccary were traded. What is still not clear is whether animals and their products were traded primarily for the prestige or ritual associated with the exotic, symbolic, or rare animals, or whether animals were traded primarily for food. Clearly though, some families and communities spe-cialized in the trade of animal products, likely as part of complex networks of exchange that included many other products as well. how did these exchanges take place and between which members of society? That again is a difficult question but with more zooarchaeological analysis, could be answered.

specialization extended beyond the acquisition and movement of re-sources. These chapters and other recent research emphasize that the crafting of animal products was also part of most household activities, even those carried out in the homes of the wealthy and noble. for ex-cellent examples, see both lapham chapters and alexander et al. (for

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an outside example, see emery and aoyama 2007.) again though, these chapters reveal that crafting varied across households, with some house-holders specializing in bone as opposed to shell, or the crafting of adorn-ments as opposed to the tools of leatherworking. and our definition of the animal products used in crafting must also be expanded because so many of these researchers have emphasized the importance of hide-work-ing and feather-working.

needless to say, how we imagine the mesoamericans “thought about” their animals is one of the richest and most intriguing topics of this vol-ume and other research from not only zooarchaeology but ethnograpy, iconography, and many other avenues. entire volumes could be written about the possible symbolic meanings of the various animals, but space does not allow such extravagance. however, several aspects are often ig-nored and i think should be much more carefully explored in our in-terpretations of animal remains. “Thoughts about” animals are clearly far more complex than we tend to present them. ancient attitudes to animals affect not only what species are encountered and where (e.g., birds in Panamanian burials, dogs in feasting deposits, dangerous animal refuse in distant discard locations, turtle carapace bowls in animal pens, opossum bundles curated in kitchens for medicinal use), but also what elements are recovered or not (e.g., raptor claws, booby limb bone shafts, large animal crania in caches or cached in off-site deposits, or turtle appendicular ele-ments returned to the water), and how those remains are treated as part of the “discard process” (e.g., as part of sacred waste, the disposal of dan-gerous waste.) The authors of this volume pay careful attention to such aspects because these are central to our interpretations of every deposit. This makes these studies a rich resource for considering how to approach such a difficult concept as reconstructing ancient “thoughts.”

finally, an important additional consideration is effectively brought to our attention by ramos’s chapter on the development of zooarchaeology in northern south america. she emphasizes the importance of zooar-chaeological research for modern applications, particularly for conserva-tion (see also ramos 2010d, 2010e). Just as the increasing rigor of our methods and detail of our observations are allowing us to delve further into the possibilities of ancient life, so too are they allowing us to use the ancient information more effectively to assist in conserving cultures, species, and environments. in the final equation, this is perhaps the most important goal of modern zooarchaeology.