Exotic Dogs and Indigenous Humans in Tropical Northeastern South America

Although the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris) is today ubiquitous throughout most of South America, it may have been a relatively late arrival in Amazonia. A dog’s comparative value to contemporary indigenous people in the tropical lowlands of Northeastern South America relates directly to its role in hunting; otherwise, it can be regarded with the same ambivalence attributed to other exotic domesticates, most of which tend to be poorly integrated into indigenous human societies. Despite cultivating a formidable array of native plants and demonstrating a marked proclivity for pets, indigenous Amazonians had few, if any, native animal domesticates. The elaborate esteem bestowed on valued hunting dogs by indigenous societies in Northeastern South America can contrast markedly with their attitude toward other exotic animal domesticates. This is likely rooted in their ontological perspectives of animal others and may be based upon a pre-Columbian template of tamed autochthonous canids.

Dog Days to Horse Days

Dogs played an important role in the social, cultural, and economic life of peoples inhabiting the Northwestern Plains of North America for thousands of years. Despite functioning as pack animals, guards, religious figures, and even companions, dogs were never as integral to Blackfoot culture as the horse became. To date, researchers have most often characterized the relationship of Blackfoot people and their horses by framing the horse as an “upgraded model”—a “new and improved” dog. While prior experience with domesticated dogs did help facilitate the incorporation of horses into the daily lives of the Blackfoot people, this chapter argues that it is the fundamental differences between dogs and horses that prove to be one of the greatest sources of cultural change between the pre- and postcontact periods. Through a framework that integrates archaeology, history, and contemporary ethnography this chapter identifies these key differences in order to better understand how the horse fostered new and dramatically different conceptions of domesticated animals that in turn had significant effects on the use and value of dogs within equestrian Blackfoot culture.

Dog Life and Death in an Ancestral Pueblo Landscape

In this chapter, we apply a landscape framework to our paleopathological and osteological analysis of canids recovered from 5MTUMR 2347, an Ancestral Pueblo site located in Mancos Canyon, Colorado, to explore the roles that dogs filled during and after life in Ancestral Pueblo communities. While previous analyses suggested these dogs were used as a secondary food source and had ritual significance, our approach finds that their different life histories (despite similar burial contexts) reflects the multiple roles played by dogs in the Ancestral Pueblo world. These findings highlight the ways in which the analysis of archaeological dog remains can be used to support indigenous communities in the present day.

Prehistoric Dogs as Hunting Tools

This chapter explores the role of hunting dogs in forager groups and as the advent of animal biotechnology. It outlines the ways in which dogs can be used as hunting biotechnology, how dogs can be incorporated into existing subsistence models, and how we can identify hunting dogs in the archaeological record. The analysis of cross-cultural utilization of dogs as a hunting tool in the ethnographic and ethnohistoric record is used to suggest insights into the ways dogs may have been utilized as a hunting adaptation by people in the past. Similarly, cost-benefit analyses employed for non-living tools, such as lithics, are employed to contextualize dogs as a quantifiable technology within optimal foraging models.

Conclusion

The study of our long-term relationships with dogs faces many theoretical and methodological challenges. Recent changes in social sciences provide profound new insights on how dogs and humans share their lives. Animals are no longer mere background in stories of human history. Rather, dogs and other animals are critical elements in the assemblages of things interacting to shape our shared experiences and long-term histories. In turn, developments in biological sciences now push us to go beyond analyses of canid remains simply for the purposes of taxonomic identification. Borrowing methods from human osteology and palaeontology, zooarchaeology is increasingly better positioned to explore details of dogs’ lives.

Scavenger and Sentry

Foragers domesticated dogs before plants and livestock. In the Near East, dogs are present from the Epipaleolithic, living with settled foragers. With the advent of farming in the Neolithic, human activities changed and dogs’ lives surely did as well. Dogs have served many roles in human societies: food, pet, guard, herding aid, and scavenger, to name a few. This chapter examines the remains of dogs and their activities (gnawed and digested bones) contextually at Çatalhöyük, a large Neolithic site occupied for approximately 1,000 years in central Anatolia. At Çatalhöyük, the evidence suggests that dogs did not play a major role in hunting or herding, but served as sentries and garbage processors. In particular, they may have contributed significantly to improving human health by consuming human feces. Comparisons with other Near Eastern Neolithic sites suggest that dogs may have occupied different niches in other places. However, there is little evidence that they were used extensively in either hunting or herding, or that they were regarded as companions in the Near Eastern Neolithic, in contrast to the earlier Epipaleolithic. Dogs become more widespread and ubiquitous through time in the Neolithic, suggesting their value increased as agriculture became established.

Using Dental Microwear to Understand the Dietary Behavior of Domestic Dogs in Precontact North America

Research presented here employs Dental Microwear Texture Analysis (DMTA) to better understand food sharing among people and dogs in the Late Precontact Northwestern Plains and Midwest. DMTA is used to examine a specific tooth on the mandible of curated dog skeletons at two archaeological repositories. Dogs in the past are often described as strictly scavengers, while this project defines scavenging behaviors of domestic dogs in two more descriptive categories that can be used to better understand human-canine food sharing. The categories are provisioned consumers, dogs either fed or allowed to scavenge successfully, and non-provisioned scavengers, dogs not scavenging successfully and exhibiting signs of food stress. These categories are assigned based on known dietary behavior ecologies of coyotes and wolves (the domestic dog’s two closest relatives). This analysis shows that nuanced feeding strategies can be observed based on dental microwear features on the teeth of domestic dogs.

Introduction

This introductory chapter situates the succeeding chapters in the current study of human-canine relationships. The authors discuss the fundamental ideas about relationships between humans and dogs through an archaeological lens. The volume editors recognize that assessing the physical ways humans have altered domestic dogs may be straightforward, but it takes several theoretical and methodological avenues to understand the connection between the ever-present dog and human communities’ needs, belief systems, and environments. This chapter overviews an extensive exploration into the way these discussions add to our understanding of how the human-canine bond shaped and was shaped by the practical and ontological realities of human caregivers.

Powerful Pups

While most Roman animal sacrifice consisted of common meat sources (sheep/goat, cattle, and pig), evidence from the early sixth century BCE Archaic temple from the Area Sacra di Sant’Omobono in Rome demonstrates that dogs were sacrificed at the site along with other domesticates. Domestic dog remains recovered from this site consist of primarily juvenile cranial elements, suggesting that there was a deliberate selection of young animals and cranial skeletal elements interred at the sanctuary. These findings from the zooarchaeological analysis provide evidence for early Romans sacrificing subadult dogs for rites of purification during the Archaic period and these practices may have been the precursors for rituals that continued into later periods.

Between Ethnography and Prehistory

The Australian dingo is an enigma—vilified by some, and little understood by most. Alternatively viewed as a native and invasive species, its ecological status as a sheep killer is often the focus, instead of its long and complex relationship with Indigenous Australians. This chapter explores the dingo’s dynamic and complex relationship with Aboriginal peoples over the past four to five thousand years, with a particular emphasis on hunting. It brings together archaeological and ethnographic evidence in an effort to bring clarity to this aspect of the dingo-human relationship. We question the use of ethnography and early colonial written records to infer pre-contact human-dingo relationships, particularly the recent suggestion that dingoes, acting as hunting companions, may have changed the gendered division of labor in Aboriginal societies, arguing that this is instead an over-simplification of a dynamic and variable relationship that warrants closer scrutiny.