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

当欧洲人在16世纪晚期到达美洲时，他们引进了许多“新发现”大陆所不知道的生物。这些生物中影响最大的是家牛，它的饲养极大地改变了景观、动物管理和人与人之间的互动。欧洲殖民主义的生物学后果，特别是牛的引入，构成了人类历史上决定性地塑造现代世界的重大事件。在本研究中，对殖民时期牛的考古遗迹进行了分析，以更好地了解这种引入不仅对牛本身的影响，而且对西班牙统治前两个世纪中美洲和加勒比地区各种殖民社会的发展也有影响。考古学，尤其是动物考古学特别适合探索这个话题，因为它提供了对影响动物生物学和行为的细粒度过程的直接分析，以及它们的管理如何影响人类社会系统。将对来自墨西哥、危地马拉和海地的五个早期殖民遗址的考古遗迹进行研究，确定这些动物的地理起源（古代DNA）、形态多样性（骨骼形态测量学）以及人口和健康结构（每个种群中个体的年龄/性别和病理）。这些遗址可追溯到16世纪初至17世纪晚期。综合这些线索，我们可以了解到第一批殖民者是如何带来、交易和交换这些动物的。在包括美国在内的许多美洲地区，养牛一直是文化和经济的一个重要方面。研究实施养牛的第一步将使人们对家畜（如牛）在美洲早期殖民中所起的关键作用有新的认识。该项目也是对该领域的方法论贡献，它首次将考古基因组学和形态特征结合起来，记录了美洲殖民地动物群的历史轨迹。美国、墨西哥和危地马拉研究人员之间的合作，以及讲座和博物馆展览将提供信息，并鼓励考古学家、生物学家和养牛人等国际观众进行讨论。为了解决早期西班牙殖民时期加勒比海和中美洲的牛的移植和开发如何改变牛和人类种群的问题，该研究项目将使用三种方法：(1)从考古牛遗骸中提取和测序古代DNA将澄清新世界殖民地牛的起源和系统地理历史。(2)几何形态测量（GMM）数据将定义奶牛臼齿形状的区域和时间变异，作为牛形态多样性的代表。这两条线索将揭示西班牙殖民时期牛的原始种群组成，强调这些动物是从欧洲还是非洲引进的，并阐明这些动物在研究地区的引进时间。(3)最后，年龄和性别的动物考古标记将记录牛群的人口统计数据，而健康的古病理学指标将说明不同畜牧业实践的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.