Subject Area
Anthropology
Abstract
This research explores the interaction between hunter-gatherer and farmer populations through time on the northern Great Plains of North American, a frontier both in the past and today. Here, the first introduction of farming products, specifically corn, can be tracked archaeologically, by mapping changes in the presence of maize in the diet of dogs recovered from human settlements. Dog diets are used in this study as a proxy for maize availability following the assumption that domesticated canines consume foods like their owners, be it by direct provisioning or scavenging. Of specific interest is the strategies Indigenous foraging populations employed after the first introduction to farmers into the region that is today the border of North and South Dakota. In North Dakota, new settlements appeared that shared characteristics with South Dakota farming villages but lacked certain traits indicative of a full adoption of farming. From the results of the combined studies, the most parsimonious hypothesis for these intermediate sites is that they were either trading with farmers to the south to the degree that their diets are practically indistinguishable, or that they are experimenting with maize agriculture in such a manner as to be masked in the archaeological record.
This research also presents a novel approach to species identification, specifically to differentiate dogs from wolves and coyotes in archaeological assemblages, using K-means Nearest Neighbor machine-learning algorithms paired with geometric morphometrics, traditional osteometrics and qualitative traits, and ancient DNA analyses. This method produces a probabilistic output for species differentiation between dog, coyote, and wolf using outlines of mandibles from photographs, trained by the other species identification studies. Finally, stable isotope analyses (organic carbon, inorganic carbon, and nitrogen) of identified dog specimens are compared to the stable isotope analyses of wild species by site and by temporal period, from the pre-agriculture Archaic Period (6500 BC-AD 500, Trabert and Hollenback 2021:29) to the Euroamerican-influenced, specifically horse-focused, Historic Period (post AD 1738, Johnson 2007a). These data offer an independent line of evidence in reconstructing past decisions of the dogs’ owners as related to diet. They are then combined with data from the archaeological record to discuss the strategies employed by Indigenous hunter-gatherers when the first farming communities arrived in the region.
Degree Date
Fall 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Anthropology
Advisor
Kacy Hollenback
Second Advisor
Karen Lupo
Number of Pages
555
Format
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Fisher, Abigail, "Dogs as Proxies for Forager-Farmer Interactions Along the Missouri River, North and South Dakota" (2024). Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
https://scholar.smu.edu/hum_sci_anthropology_etds/26
