Zooarchaeology

Joanne Bowen: I am Joanne Bowen, I am from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and I am the curator of zooarchaeology.

Zooarchaeology is a field within archaeology, and it’s an interdisciplinary field that combines zoology archaeology, and history. It also includes anthropology. It’s the study of archaeological animal remains.

I’ve always found this to be a really fascinating way to look at past life. They’re special as a class within archaeology because they are from the environment, and they allow us to study the human relationship with the Earth, and sort of the interactive that they influence the Earth as they use it, and the earth changes and influences human behavior.

When you look in the archaeological remains, it’s a really fantastic source of what people ate. As I have worked with the archaeological remains and worked with documentary sources, I’ve come to understand just how important they are.

When you look at it from that perspective, they give you a picture that is very, very different from what secondary histories say about diet. I have found this to be challenging. It makes you think about what historical texts say about diet, and it brings you to go back and look at the primary records with a new question. And you always come out in a new place.

Bones tell you about diet, but they don’t tell you about the social event where they were consumed, or why people thought they were important. So I look to the diaries to tell us when they were eaten and how they were important.

So there are two sources of evidence, always takes you out, takes you into a very, very interesting world that makes you think about things in a new way.

So, I look at it as interdisciplinary in a sense that you’ve got documents, you’ve got archaeological remains, artifacts and the site itself, and you have the zooarchaeological remains, the animal bones.

All of them give you independent but contemporary sources of information on the same topic. So it’s truly an interactive relationship, and it allows us in a very important way to get at how people lived.

© 2012 The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation