animal bones and the role of animals in archaeology. So we have a few specimens to kind of help us along as we talk about how we actually go about doing that and looking at the different roles animals have played in the past in human-animal interactions, human environmental interactions, how we can learn about that from the bones. So, I have here, a few skulls. This is a deer, a white-tail deer, and if we look at the teeth, we can tell that it's a plant eater because of the shape of the teeth, the morphology of the teeth. This is a dog. And you can see right away, if you look at his teeth, they're sharp, made for meat eating. So, those are the teeth of a carnivore. And this is a javelina type of wild pig peccary and it has a varied diet. It's an omnivore. So then you can see here the teeth are, have a different morphology than the other two because it has a more varied diet. And humans are omnivorous, hence we also have very variable shape teeth. One of the central questions in zooarchaeology, and that zooarchaeologists are interested in, is the origins of domestic animals, and how human-animal relationships changed very drastically within a relatively short period of time. Going from hunting wild game you know, wild boar, red deer, large wild horses, that sort of thing. To then having our own domestic sheep and goat and rearing livestock. So one of the ways we can create these demographic profiles is by aging and sexing the animal bones. And so here I have two humeri, that's the upper arm, and you can see this one is fully fused. It's an adult animal. This bone is still fusing, so it's a juvenile, because animals you know, as the bones grow, they fuse, yours as well. >> So when we start out with, when we're born, we start out with more bones, right, and then when we grow, like. >> Yeah, so there, the, the kind of main shaft of the bone is separate from the epiphyses. Those are the ends of the bone, and as the bone grows, it fuses together into one bone. We can sometimes sex animals by measuring them. So males are generally larger than females especially in sexually competitive polygamous species. And so if the bone is fully fused, we can measure two different adults. And usually, they'll separate out and males will be larger than females. Other things include antlers. So this is a male deer. And there's some morphology on the pelvis that can sometimes help us distinguish female animals from male animals. But it's not necessarily always present. So aging and sexing. A lot of times, you'll go down from a really large sample size. You know, 2,000 bones, but you may only be able to age and sex you know, 50 to 60 of them. Because once fusion is complete at around five years of age for most mammals you can only just say that the animal is, is older than that. Aging and sexing based on teeth, we can also tell that this is a male because he has very nice, big canines. females do also have canines, but they're usually smaller than males. In the pigs in particular. In terms of aging, we can also age animals based on tooth eruption and tooth wear. So the teeth erupt. Again, like the long bones fused within distinct periods of time, so do the teeth. So we know for example that the, the you know, just like you and I had baby teeth the animals also have milk molars, they're sometimes called. And so those teeth fall out, and then their permanent teeth come in. And based on the timing of that, we can, we can often age an animal. Again, that's usually happening around the same time that the, the long bones are fusing. So before five years of age. However we can extend the aging a little bit further by using wear. So a lot of people, a lot of zooarchaeologists have put a lot of time and effort into studies which look at distinct stages of tooth wear and age with, you know, with known age animals and seeing what the teeth look like. This is called the occlusal surface, so it's the surface that you bite on. By looking at the way that changes over time, you can actually age the animal. Now this, this poor diseased goat is definitely an adult animal because I can, you know, its third molar has erupted. And then its first molar and second molar have actually, are actually quite worn, so I would say that this animal is between six to eight years of age you know, based on my experience of using these techniques. Another thing we can look at besides demographics is also pathology, so a lot of times we start to see pathology or disease in animal bones once they're domesticated. And this is a, a goat. And you can see here the teeth are sort of crowded. which happens with the sort of size reduction and there's less room in the mouth for the, all the teeth. And they're also kind of worn very funnily, so this one is, this side is okay, but this you, you can see is not. And that's because this animal actually suffered a tooth loss earlier in its life. So the, the teeth wore down in sort of an odd pattern. And normally if something like this happened in the wild, the animal had sort of a, a gum infection or something like that. A lot of times they would just die, and you wouldn't see evidence of healing like you do in this animal. But when animals are being kept and cared for by humans, a lot of times they can survive those types of, of you know, those types of trauma. So a lot of times we see kind of healed breaks and that sort of thing in domestic animals. Whereas we wouldn't see that in the wild, all the time. >> Can you date like when these animals were living? Is that possible? >> Well, so, most of our dating is done you know, through relative dating. >> Yeah. >> We know the age of the context from other cultural material that's come out. Especially, you know, in historic period sites and, and well-dated ceramic prehistoric sites. In cave sites and prehistoric sites, a lot of times we're relying on radiocarbon dates which can take us back about, you know, 40,000 years. And further back than that, a lot of times we're using alternative dating methods or just lithic typologies. We don't just look at sort of domestic, you know, domestic animals, wild animals. We're also have interest in particular animals, this is a bird bone, so animals like birds, and small mammals like groundhogs and amphibians and reptiles can also be used as really good indicators of local environments. So of course, a lot of birds migrate seasonally, and you know, they also prefer certain habitats. Like we have waterbirds, shorebirds, that sort of thing. So they can oftentimes be indicative of, of what the environment is like, and we can, we can often reconstruct on the basis of what we find. But these are all, or for the most part, are modern bones that I've brought to show to you. Usually when we're digging up remains, we get nice pieces like this. So this is part of a, a cow, a humurus, and it's from a bronze age site in Italy. And as you can see it's pretty, it's pretty beat up and, and dirty. So that's usually what they're, they look like when they come out of the ground. Not nice and clean like these guys. A lot of times we can tell whether or not animals have been consumed by people looking at whether or not there's butchery and cut marks. Certain types of breaks, and also burning. So this is what a burnt, burnt bone looks like. It's amazing how the number of fish remains has dramatically increased since people started wet sieving and screening. back in the days when people would just excavate and just kind of hand-pick you know, nice big pieces of bone like this and think to save it, and they wouldn't sieve the actual dirt. So, small things like fish bones and small animals just kind of got discarded. When we're wondering whether or not an assemblage, a group of animal bones, has been generated by humans or whether it's a natural accumulation, especially when we're dealing with prehistoric sites or caves that could be inhabited by animals like hyenas, for example. We really want to know whether or not it was human beings and food waste, you know, whether the assemblage is a result of food waste or whether it's from denning activity. So we use taphonomy, which is the study of essentially everything that could happen from death to burial and beyond between when we, the animal dies and we look at it. So that includes things like weathering. For example, this is a dog skull that's been lying out on the Arctic tundra for quite some time and this is sort of a prepared specimen, so you can see that this has been quite weathered and worn away and was never buried. But often times, if we imagine in the past, this sort of thing sitting out on the, the ground on the surface, and then being buried. We would be able to tell that when we look at the archaeological bone, you know, if it was sat out on surface for some time, or whether it was buried right away, based on the degree of preservation.