The Zooarchaeological Collection
Colonial Williamsburg’s zooarchaeological collection is one of the largest
in eastern North America, with a database that includes more than 1.1 million
bone fragments from over 160 sites. Recovered between the 1960s and the present,
this collection spans the growth of environmental archaeology from the recognition of bones
as artifacts to the collection of even the smallest fragments. The strength
of this collection lies in the breadth of sites represented: urban to
rural, poor to wealthy, and white to enslaved African-American households. Over a fifty-year period,
both scholars and students have taken advantage of this strength, pursuing
questions related to dietary patterns, seasonality, provisioning, animal husbandry,
landscape, and livestock ecology.
Current Research with the Collection
Butchery Studies
Working together with Foodways staff, historians, and William
& Mary students, Colonial Williamsburg’s zooarchaeologists are conducting
actualistic research to determine eighteenth- and nineteenth-century butchery techniques. Research
has focused on characteristic marks left by chopping tools, chopping techniques,
meat cuts, and how they changed in response to the commercialization of meat processing.
The Study of Williamsburg and its Environs: The Provisioning Study
Working with historians to answer the question of how townspeople supplied
themselves with food, Colonial Williamsburg’s zooarchaeologists developed
an approach to place Williamsburg’s marketplace in its regional context.
During a multi-year project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities,
we analyzed previously-excavated faunal assemblages from urban and rural
seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century Chesapeake sites, to compile
a regional database composed of well over a hundred faunal assemblages. This
database has become the basis from which Chesapeake zooarchaeologists
have reconstructed the provisioning of meat and looked at animal husbandry
as it responded to elite planters, who began producing beef, mutton, and
pork for sale in Williamsburg. Research has also explored urban provisioning,
showing how urban households procured meat by drawing upon their own resources,
people they knew in the countryside, the marketplace, and local merchants.
As research moves forward with new initiatives, this database, which is
being constantly expanded, has become a resource for zooarchaeologists,
students, and historians alike.
Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS)
The Zooarchaeology Laboratory has collaborated with Monticello archaeologists
on this web-based initiative to analyze faunal remains from enslaved African-American
sites
located in the Chesapeake. Aimed at making archaeological data accessible
to scholars everywhere, DAACS has developed classification and measurement
standards that enable scholars from different disciplines to integrate
maps, artifact and faunal records,
and other relevant information. In recent years, the DAACS project
has addressed several other sites from the Chesapeake, the Carolinas
and the Caribbean.
The Study of Animal Husbandry, Landscape, and the Ecology of Food Production
Drawing upon
the regional faunal database, zooarchaeologists are actively engaged in exploring
how the development of an agrarian subsistence system based in tobacco culture
molded and altered the Chesapeake, a landscape that had been modified by Native
American populations for many thousands of years. Current research initiatives
are drawing on this faunal evidence to explore dietary patterns, slaughter
patterns, and morphometrics. Increasingly zooarchaeologists are working with
evidence drawn from archaeobotanical remains, pollen, phytoliths, and stable
isotopes.
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