Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Social and Ecological Effects of Cattle Introduction

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When Europeans arrived to the Americas in the late 1500s, they introduced many organisms unknown to the "newly discovered" continent. The most impactful of these organisms was the domestic cow, the raising of which dramatically changed landscapes, animal management, and interactions among people. The biological consequence of the European colonialism, and in particular the introduction of cattle, constitutes a major event of human history that definitively shaped the modern world. In this study, archaeological remains of colonial period cattle are analyzed to better understand the effects of this introduction not only on the cattle themselves, but also on the development of the diverse colonial societies of Mesoamerica and the Caribbean during the two first centuries of Spanish rule. Archaeology, and more particularly zooarchaeology is particularly well placed to explore this topic because it provides a direct analysis of the fine-grained processes that affected the animals' biology and behavior but also how their management affected human social systems. Archaeological remains from five early colonial sites from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti, dating between the early 16th and the late 17th centuries, will be studied to identify the geographic origins of the animals (ancient DNA), their morphological diversity (skeletal morphometrics), and their demographic and health structure (age/sex and pathologies of the individuals within each population). Together these lines of evidence will provide an image of how the first colonists brought, traded and exchanged these animals. Cattle raising represented, and still represents in many regions of the Americas including the US, a crucial aspect of culture and economics. Studying the first steps of the implementation of cattle raising will shed a new light on the pivotal role played by domestic animals such as cattle in the early colonization of the Americas. This project is also a methodological contribution to the field by constituting the first use of combined archaeological genomics and morphological traits to document the history trajectory of colonial faunas in the Americas. Collaborations among US, Mexican and Guatemalan researchers, as well as lectures and museum exhibits will provide information and encourage discussion among the international audience of archaeologists, biologists, and cattle-owners. To address the question of how the transplantation and exploitation of cattle transformed both cattle and human populations in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica during the early Spanish colonial period, the research project will use three methodological approaches: (1) extraction and sequencing of ancient DNA from archaeological cow remains will clarify the origins and phylogeographic history of New World colonial cattle. (2) Geometric morphometric (GMM) data will define the regional and temporal variability of cow molar shape as a proxy for cattle morphotype diversity. These two lines of evidence will reveal the composition of the original populations of Spanish colonial cattle, highlight whether the animals were brought from Europe or Africa, and clarify the chronology of these introductions across the study region. (3) Finally, zooarchaeological markers of age and sex will document cattle herd demographics, and paleopathological indicators of health will illustrate the impact of diverse cattle husbandry practices.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.