Labs
Osteology Laboratory
Lab Director: Nancy J. Akins
Animal bones can provide a wealth of information on how past populations lived and adapted to local and regional resources and conditions. While it is important to know which animals were utilized, much more can be learned from the more detailed information routinely recorded by the OAS analyses. Body parts, butchering practices, what is burned and to what degree, and whether the bone has been exposed to weathering or was gnawed on by carnivores or rodents all give indications of how animals were used. 
Currently, the two major projects for the lab occupy different ends of the time scale and subsistence practices. Fauna recovered from the Pojoaque Corridor sites date from the Developmental period (A.D. 900 to 1000) and are interesting in several respects. In contrast with subsistence practices in much of the Southwest, where most of the bone recovered from archaeological sites is from rabbits, these sites have large amounts of bone from deer and pronghorn. This suggests that the subsistence pattern is somewhat different. Rather than the more settled agriculturalist diet of rabbit supplemented by larger animals and/or turkeys, the amount of large-animal remains found in these sites suggests the groups were more mobile and depended less on agricultural products for their subsistence.
The second project is the fauna from the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. An immense amount of bone was recovered, so only selected features could be analyzed. These features range from the early occupation of the area by Spanish Colonial groups to deposits from the Mexican and Territorial periods. Even within the same general time period, the fauna from these features varies greatly. A very few features have mainly native fauna like rabbits and deer. Many have large amounts of sheep and goat bones, with fewer from cattle, pigs, chickens, and horses, and hardly any native fauna. A few have mainly cattle bones, with a few from sheep and goats, pigs, horses, chickens, and very little native fauna. These are large samples, and I look forward to exploring the temporal and spatial distributions of the content of these different features.