With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Wake and a team of undergraduate research trainees will conduct two years of detailed analysis of vertebrate faunal remains recovered from four Formative Period archaeological sites in the Soconusco Region of Southwest Pacific Mesoamerica. This project will examine the role vertebrate resources had in the development of SW Mesoamerican societies across the roughly 2000 year Formative Period on the Soconusco coastal plain of Pacific Chiapas, Mexico and adjacent Pacific Guatemala. The Formative Period in this region includes the transition from mobile hunter-gatherer adaptations to early sedentary agricultural societies, into simple and complex chiefdoms, culminating in early states.
This project will provide much needed new information and synthesis of vertebrate faunal collections that have been languishing since their initial excavation at both theoretical and substantive levels. Little is known about Formative Period diets, dietary change through time and human effects on available vertebrate resources through time in the region. The project will examine several research questions including whether human exploitation impacted locally available resources and, if so, how human populations responded to resource stress. Increasing reliance on dogs as food and net fishing for high yield low-trophic level fishes is one possible response to resource stress and increasing populations in the region during the Formative Period. This project will test this and other hypotheses with new data from at least four recently excavated archaeological sites: Paso de la Amada, La Blanca, Canton Corralito and Cuauhtemoc. The results of these analyses will be compared to collections from 8 other regional sites previously examined at UCLA to investigate local variability and broad regional trends.
The broader impacts of this study include the illustration that the close examination of animal bones from a region absent of intensive animal domestication and husbandry can provide important information concerning economic and political changes related to the development of socio-political complexity. This project will analyze and synthesize languishing, information-rich vertebrate archaeofaunas in order to provide a more complete synthesis of vertebrate exploitation, human impacts, and dietary roles during the development of social complexity in the region. An important part of this project is the support and training of undergraduate research assistants in the methodology of zooarchaeology and faunal analysis. The project will augment the vertebrate comparative collections held at UCLA. Ultimately this project hopes to encourage greater investment in zooarchaeological study in the neotropics by supplying high-quality data and interpretations, well-trained future zooarchaeology graduate students, and the collections and facilities to expedite research-driven analysis of vertebrate archaeofaunas.
