Meetings:
The ACZ is meeting once a month. Dates are announced on the
discussion list. The next meeting hasn't been scheduled yet -
stay tuned.
Lately, we have been meeting the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) in the Beatrice McDonald Building (Room 102) to process animals for the comparative collection. Our next processing day is January 28, 2012 at 10:00am. These pictures were taken by Aubrey Morrison during the October 2011 processing day. We are using horse manure to process the animals. Each container has a layer of manure placed on the bottom, then window screen placed over the manure layer, the carcass put on the window screen which is folded over the animal (like a taco). Then another layer of manure is placed over this, and the lid put on. The identification information is written on an index card and put in a ziplock bag. The bag is taped onto the lid of the container and the container is put on a shelf in a warm place (garage for example) and left for several months as the enzymes from the manure digest the meat from the bones. Some animals process better than others but usually we just wash off the bones and leave them out to dry. Some need additional work. In these pictures we are removing birds provided by Fish and Wildlife Service from the manure and laying them out to dry. Later they will be given a catalog number and placed in the collection at UAA.
Workshop: The 2012 workshop will be in Seattle on February 29. Mike Etnier will be providing a tour of the sea mammal collection at the Burke Museum. It is very important that you register for this early so we know how many to expect on the tour. Information about the workshop is available on the Workshop page.
CHRISTINA JENSEN
SCHOLARSHIP
We established a scholarship
in Christina Jensen's name to help a student working on a
zooarchaeological project. Christina Jensen was a graduate student at
the University of Alaska Anchorage who was an active member of the
Alaska Consortium of Zooarchaeologists and was specializing in
zooarchaeology in her graduate studies. She passed away in
the
summer of 2005 and the members of ACZ created a scholarship in her
memory. We welcome any donations to apply toward her
scholarship. The scholarship is open to any student working
on
zooarchaeological research who is also a member of the Alaska
Anthropological Association. The deadline is February 15,
2012.
Past recipients of the Christina Jensen Scholaship:
2006 Ross Smith, from Portland State University. He was examining the effect of fish bone density on the representation of fish taxa and fish element representation in archaeological sites from the North Pacific coast. He used Dual-Energy X-ray Absorpitometry (DEXA) to measure bone density from Pacific cod, halibut, and salmon elements.
2007 Cody Strathe, is a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Strathe is working with the fauna from Mink Island, Alaska. Mink Island is the oldest dated site in the Amalik Bay National Historic Landmark in Katmai National Park and Preserve. Specifically, Strathe is analyzing harbor seal bones for stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in order to develop a proxy of marine ecosystem productivity during past millennia.
2008 Kelly Eldridge, is a graduate student at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Eldridge is working with the fauna from Zapadni, an early Russian period site on St. Paul Island in the Pribilof Islands, Alaska. She will be determining meat weights using modern fur seals, and will be comparing the fur seal remains from the site to modern specimens to determine if there are differences that may be related to climate changes at the end of the Little Ice Age.
2009 Travis Shinabarger, is a graduate student at the University of Alaska Anchorage working on fauna from Kotzebue, Alaska.
2010 Holly McKinney, is a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks working with fauna from Mink Island in Southwest Alaska. She is analyzing fish remains and a portion of her work will include isotopic analysis for taphonomic information.
2011 Rhea Hood and Adam Freeburg. Rhea is a M.A. student from the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is working on an assemblage from Little Takli Island near the Alaska Peninsula to examine the interactions of the people from the Katmai coast with nearby Kodiak Island and othe rparts of the Alaska Peninsula. Adam is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington working on the faunal remains from Cape Krusenstern National Monument. He will examine collections from Ipiutak and Thule period occupations to determine the effect of sea ice variability on subsistence.
Lee Post
has several skeleton
building books available at $34.00 per copy (price includes shipping
and handling). You can order
directly from Lee Post.
Lee
has a new book Bone Builder's
Notebook
or more than you
really wanted to know about preparing animal skeletons for articulation.
It covers everything from
cleaning skeletons and degreasing them,
articulating study skeletons, to repairing the study
skeletons.
It is a particularly wonderful resource for zooarchaeologists trying to
figure out how to prepare the skeletons for a comparative collection.
He talks about preparing skeletons using dermestids, boiling (with a
bird skeleton boiling time chart), maceration, composting,
etc.
This volume is larger than his other books and sells for $50.
New books:
The Archaeology of North Pacific Fisheries, edited by Madonna L. Moss and Aubrey Cannon. 2011. University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks.
Human and nonhuman bone identification: a concise field guide. Diane L. France. 2011. CRC Press, Talor & Francis Group, Boca Raton.
A practical guide to in situ dog remains for the field archaeologist. Susan J. Crockford. 2009. Pacific Identifications Inc., Victoria, B.C. www.pacificid.com
Recent Mammals of Alaska by Stephen O. McDonald and Joseph A. Cook. 2009. University of Alaska Press.
Quantitative Paleozoology by R. Lee Lyman. 2008. Cambridge University Press.
Identification of Waterfowl Breastbones and Avian Osteology (Sterna) of North American Anseriformes, by David W. Oates, ed. D. Boyd, and Jennifer S. Ramarkers. 2003. Virginia Museum of Natural History, Martinsville.
Innovations in assessing season of capture, age and sex of archaeofaunas, Anne Pike-Tay, editor. ArcaeoZoologia, Vol. XI/1.2. Available from Oxbow Books
The Rockfishes of the Northeast Pacific, by Milton S. Love, Mary Yoklavich, and Lyman Thorsteinson. 2002. University of California Press, Berkeley
Fishes of Alaska by Catherine W. Mecklenburg, T. Anthony Mecklenburg and Lyman K. Thorsteinson.2002. American Fisheries Society, Bethesda, Maryland.
Recent
articles by members:
Hanson, Diane K. 2009.
Salmon
and Models of Social Complexity on the Northwest Coast. North Pacific
Prehistory. 2:
Corbett,
Debra G., Douglas Causey, Mark Clementz, Paul L.
Koch, Angela Doroff, Christine LeFevre, and
Darwent, Christyann M. 2006 Reassessing the Old Whaling Locality at Cape Krusenstern, Alaska. In: Dynamics of Northern Societies. Proceedings of the SILA/NABO Conference on Arctic and North Atlantic Archaeology, Copenhagen, May 10th–14th, 2004, edited by Jette Arneborg and Bjarne Grønnow, pp. 95–102. PNM, Publications from the National Museum , Studies in Archaeology and History, Vol. 10, Copenhagen.
Darwent, John, and Christyann M. Darwent. 2005 The Occupational History of the Old Whaling Site at Cape Krusenstern . Alaska Journal of Anthropology 3(2):135–153.
Darwent, Cristyann M. and John Darwent. 2004. Where the muskox roamed: biography of tundra muskox (Ovibos muschatus) in the eastern arctic. In Zooarchaeology and Conservation Biology. Edited by R. Lee Lyman and Kenneth P. Canon. Univ of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Pp. 61-87.
Darwent, Christyann M. 2002. The highs and lows of high arctic mammals: temporal change and regional variability in paleoeskimo subsistence. Colonization, Migration, and Marginal Areas. Edited by Mondini, M., Munoz, S., and Wickler, S. 9th ICAZ Conference, Durham. Pp. 62-73.
Etnier, Michael A. 2004. The potential of zooarchaeological data to guide pinniped management decisions in the Eastern North Pacific. In: Zooarchaeology and Conservation Biology, edited by R.L. Lyman and K.P. Cannon, pp 88-102. Univ. of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Kopperl, Robert E. 2003. Cultural complexity and resource intensification on Kodiak Island, Alaska. PhD Dissertation, Dept. of Anthropology, Univ. of Washington, Seattle.
Endicott, Neal and Robert Ackerman. 2004. Microtene fauna from the Lime Hills cave, SW Alaska. Poster presented at the Society for American Archaeology meeting.
Darwent, Christyanne. 2001. High Arctic Paleoeskimo Fauna: Temporal Changes and Regional Differences. Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia. PhD Dissertation.
Etnier, Michael A. 2002. The effects of human hunting on northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus) migration and breeding distributions in the Late Holocene. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington.
Etnier, M. A. 2002. Occurrences of Guadalupe fur seals (Arctocephalus townsendi) on the Washington coast over the past 500 years. Marine Mammal Science 18(2):551-557.
Larson, S., R. Jameson, M. Etnier, M. Fleming, and P. Bentzen 2002. Loss of genetic diversity in sea otters (Enhydra lutris) associated with the fur trade of the 18th and 19th centuries. Molecular Ecology 11(10):1899-1904.
Morin, P.A., LeDuc, R.G., Robertson, K.M., Hedrick , N.M. , Perrin, W.F., Etnier, M., Wade, P., and Taylor, B.L. 2006. Genetic analysis of killer whale (Orcinus orca) historical bone and tooth samples to identify western U.S. ecotypes. Marine Mammal Science 22(4): 897-909.
Saleeby, Becky. 2002. Out of place bones: beyond the study of prehistoric subsistence. J. Arctic Research. Fall.