Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Process of Faunal Domestication

In this doctoral dissertation project researchers will examine management of birds at several archaeological sites. In these instances birds were used for diverse purposes, including as sources of food, feathers, companionship, beauty, and song. And although birds were rarely domesticated, they were often fed and housed in and around human settlements.

The goal of this project is to establish how bird biology and human social organization together influenced human-bird interactions and to use this information to understand when and why birds were kept in captivity. Captive birds represent an understudied, gray area in between wild and domestic—sometimes referred to as low-intensity management. Currently information about the use of captive animals in the past comes largely from studies of ancient nation-states.

This project will provide details on the role of managed birds in complex, non-state societies. It will broaden understanding of the role of captive animals in the past and explore the role specific avian attributes and societal structure play in shaping animal management decisions. Further, by improving understanding of specific forms of past animal management, the research will make an important contribution to broader areas of anthropological inquiry including domestication processes, human and non-human agency, and the variable nature of human-animal relationships.

Finally, the use of existing collections to address new questions respects the finite nature of the archaeological record and the need to conserve it.

The dissertation student will conduct her doctoral dissertation research on bird bones from two archaeological sites. Analysis will focus on detailed recording of skeletal portion, completeness, modifications, skeletal pathologies, age, and sex. These data will be combined with the results of archival and ornithological research and used to reconstruct details of bird use and management at these sites, addressing the following questions: 1) Does a bird species’ biological suitability for human management relate to how it was obtained or kept in the past? 2) Are the birds under human control used for different purposes than wild caught individuals?

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.