With National Science Foundation support, Drs. James O'Connell and Karen Lupo will study the anatomical distribution of meat and its nutritional value in a variety of East African wild game species. Working in close collaboration with the Kenyan government, they will be given access to the carcasses of ca. five species of game culled by the Kenyan Wildlife Service. They will transport and have the carcasses butchered in a traditional manner and then determine the amounts of meat and marrow from different anatomical portions. Nutritional analyses will also be conducted and on this basis the relative "value" of each portion can be determined. The costs involved in processing can also be measured and a cost/benefit ratio established. Animal bones which represent the remains of meals are often recovered from prehistoric African sites and on this basis archaeologists attempt to reconstruct prehistoric behavior patterns. Often unexpected and non-random distributions of body parts are discovered at sites and these can be difficult to explain. In an attempt to solve this apparent puzzle, Dr. O'Connell and his colleagues have studied the Hadza, a present- day group of East African hunters and gatherers and again the results are surprising because they do not conform to a simple least effort model. However, studies which involve controlled butchering have never been conducted on wild African species and hopefully the utility information collected will shed new light on this question. This research is important for several reasons. Because faunal remains are recovered from many archaeological sites and constitute a major data source, many archaeologists focus on the analysis of such material. The information collected by Drs. O'Connell and Lupo will provide valuable data which will be widely used in many archaeological contexts. The goal is to understand human subsistence strategies and how these developed over time.
