Abstract
Assessing past foodways, subsistence strategies, and environments depends on the accurate identification of animals in the archaeological record. The high rates of fragmentation and often poor preservation of animal bones at many archaeological sites across sub-Saharan Africa have rendered archaeofaunal specimens unidentifiable beyond broad categories, such as “large mammal” or “medium bovid”. Identification of archaeofaunal specimens through Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS), or peptide mass fingerprinting of bone collagen, offers an avenue for identification of morphologically ambiguous or unidentifiable bone fragments from such assemblages. However, application of ZooMS analysis has been hindered by a lack of complete reference peptide markers for African taxa, particularly bovids. Here we present the complete set of confirmed ZooMS peptide markers for members of all African bovid tribes. We also identify two novel peptide markers that can be used to further distinguish between bovid groups. We demonstrate that nearly all African bovid subfamilies are distinguishable using ZooMS methods, and some differences exist between tribes or sub-tribes, as is the case for Bovina (cattle) vs. Bubalina (African buffalo) within the subfamily Bovinae. We use ZooMS analysis to identify specimens from extremely fragmented faunal assemblages from six Late Holocene archaeological sites in Zambia. ZooMS-based identifications reveal greater taxonomic richness than analyses based solely on morphology, and these new identifications illuminate Iron Age subsistence economies c. 2200–500 cal BP. While the Iron Age in Zambia is associated with the transition from hunting and foraging to the development of farming and herding, our results demonstrate the continued reliance on wild bovids among Iron Age communities in central and southwestern Zambia Iron Age and herding focused primarily on cattle. We also outline further potential applications of ZooMS in African archaeology.
Highlights
Secure identification of animal taxa in the archaeological record is critical for assessing past subsistence strategies, environments, foodways, and tracking species dispersals and translocations
[9] Where reported in faunal analyses, the less- or non-identifiable component comprises the bulk of faunal assemblages, and bovids comprise the majority of minimally-identifiable mammal remains [10,11,12,13,14,15]
Our results reveal that subsistence economies were grounded in cattle-based pastoralism, and included hunting of wild bovids, cephalophines
Summary
Secure identification of animal taxa in the archaeological record is critical for assessing past subsistence strategies, environments, foodways, and tracking species dispersals and translocations. Manufacture of bone tools or objects typically involves removal of epiphyses and obliterates identifiable features [9] Where reported in faunal analyses, the less- or non-identifiable component comprises the bulk of faunal assemblages, and bovids comprise the majority of minimally-identifiable mammal remains [10,11,12,13,14,15] Given this large proportion of remains that are not attributable to taxon in so many archaeological sites, zooarchaeologists have been limited in their interpretations of African subsistence strategies, foodways, and the economic and symbolic importance of animals in the past
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