Anthropology.net

by Carl T. Feagans
If I tickle or play with my daughter, I’m immediately attacked (playfully) by the family dog that will defend her to the end. With the exception of dinosaurs, my daughter’s favorite two animals are dogs and horses and it’s reflected in her movies, toys and play. She loves to watch movies like Shaggy Dog, the Beethoven series, Flicka, Spirit, and two or three others about either horses or dogs. She has a dozen or so each in stuffed animals and often pretends to be a dog or horse as she plays.

My daughter, at five years old, accepts without question something that I think people have accepted for thousands of years: dogs and horses are special friends to humanity. I’ve been thinking of this special relationship that humanity has shared with a few, select species (dogs, horses, and cats) recently, partially because of my daughter’s own affinity for them, but also because it’s an obvious fact of humanity that is universal. Sure, there are other species of animals humans seem preoccupied with, but none so loyal, noble or revered as the three in parentheses above. To explore these relationships in detail I looked in the peer-reviewed literature to see what others had to say. In this short piece, I’ll discuss dogs and the information is found primarily in Darcy F. Morey’s article, Burying key evidence: the social bond between dogs and people, in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Morey’s main focus is on the funerary practices that people have carried out with dogs over thousands of years. Most anthropologists accept that the dog was the first domesticated animals and burials are found worldwide which date as far back as 12,000 to 14,000 years. Dogs are mostly buried individually and in ritual fashion as if they were a family member, often in positions intended to provide “comfort” as with paws under the head or with the head resting on the body. The consistent nature of body positioning at burial within each region gives the ritualistic quality, and the facts that people took the time and effort to bury the canine corpse below ground and carefully positioned provide evidence that dogs had special status for people in antiquity. In addition, many dog burials have been found with grave goods, including carefully positioned soft-shell clams at a grave site in Puerto Rico.

In other cases, dogs have been found buried with people, presumably the dog’s owner, suggesting that the relationship was such that when the owner died the dog was interred to provide continued companionship. Burials such as this were found in Kentucky at Indian Knoll (ca. 3000 BCE), where there were instances of children buried with two dogs. What better, more loyal companion to send into the afterlife to look after your child?

Morey quotes William Webb, the archaeologist that worked the Indian Knoll site in the 1960’s and 1970’s:

… one must conclude that dogs were often killed at the time of burial of their owner, and buried with them perhaps as a symbol of continued association in the spirit world.

And, to quote Morey:

What is most intriguing, of course, about their possible “continued association in the ‘spirit world’” is what such a projected association signifies about their relationship with people in life.

In Ashkelon, Israel during the Persian Period (ca. 500 – 300 BCE), approximately 1000 individual dogs were buried in individual graves in what can only be described as a dog cemetery. Over half of the burials were puppies and none showed signs of brutality, suggesting that the cause of death was disease or injury. If nothing else, the Ashkelon cemetery demonstrates that the idea of a pet cemetery is not something new and that people here accepted their dogs as members of the family.

The dog has been with us, archaeologically, for 12,000 to 14,000 years. That is to say, the archaeological record doesn’t reveal any contexts of domesticated dogs prior to 14,000 BP, the oldest context generally accepted to be at Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, ca. 14,000 BP. At this site, a single piece of a dog jaw is associated with a human grave. Geneticists, at one point, attempted to pin down the domestication point at around 100,000 to 130,000 years ago, based on mutation rates. However, more recent data in canine genetic research puts that point at around 15,000 to 40,000 years ago – wide range, to be sure, but one that is more in line with the archaeological record. It’s been suggested more than once that the dog probably domesticated itself, living on the fringes of human settlements and slowly adapting to accept and coexist with people, living off of their trash (yes, people in antiquity had trash, archaeologists call them middens).

My dog thinks she’s a person. No doubt about it. As I write this, she’s lying on the couch on her back, dead asleep and snoring. When I go to bed, I know she’ll follow, jump on the bed, give me a quick “kiss” on the cheek then curl up at the foot of the bed where she’ll stay till sunrise. The best thing about a dog is that the love you get is unconditional. Even abusive humans are loved by their dog victims. Dogs provide services that extend beyond companionship by service to the blind, the autistic, the elderly, and the very young. There are even dogs that can alert their owner to impending seizures. Not to mention drug dogs, guard dogs, search dogs, rescue dogs, and cadaver dogs. And the list goes on I’m sure.

Next time, I’ll look at the relationship between people and horses.

Source
Morey, Darcy F. (2006) Burying key evidence: the social bond between dogs and people. Journal of Archaeological Science, 33(2), 158-175.

“The tattooed man stopped at the edge of the meadow and sat on a rock for a moment as he shook the old grass from his bearskin soled boots. After replacing with fresh grass and ensuring that it was evenly distributed around his feet, the man stood, gathering his bow, quiver, and snow shoes, which slung over his shoulders, and continued his trek. He needed to reach the village by nightfall. The grass would keep his feet warm and the new grass was needed since the deep snow covered any chance of grass in the highlands.Arriving at the village just as the sun dipped behind the mountain, no one dared approach to greet the man. Indeed, the village’s people -his friends, his family, people he new for many years, literally turned their backs on him and went inside the warm thatch of their homes. Forgiveness would not come easy. If at all. The man reached his own home, now empty and desolate without a woman’s attention.

He cooked and served his own meal and intended to sleep through the night before speaking with the village elders in the morning. But morning wouldn’t wait. The shout from village center saw to that. More shouts. Demands that he come out. Knowing this wouldn’t go the way he’d hoped, the man gathered the things he entered with in haste and kicked out the back wall of the house. His intent was to steal off in the night yet again, this time not to return with the hope of a forgiveness that now seems impossible.

But the night wasn’t as black as he’d hoped and the firelight from the village center must have revealed him to the men waiting for him there. After making it only a few steps from the his house, the tattooed man felt the sharp pain and jolt of the impact by what could only be an arrow striking him in the back of the left shoulder. Had he slung his gear over that shoulder instead… Falling to his knees but for a second, the tattooed man was again up and ran as hard and as fast as he could for the darkest shadows, knowing that once there he would be back in his element and able to make for the highlands once again. This time, there would be no return. “

The above is pure speculation with regard to many things, but some of the details about the tattooed man we now refer to as Ötzi are being confirmed. New research, soon to be published in the Journal of Archaeological Sciences and Quaternary Sciences Review are confirming the so-called “disaster theory ” of the last days of Ötzi, the Iceman. Ötzi was found in 1991 by two German tourists hiking in Austria, his remains naturally frozen and mummified by a glacier and dating to ca. 3300 BCE. The two different research teams, one in Bolzano, Italy and the other in Innsbruck, Austria have confirmed a few things relating to Ötzi’s death:

1. that it was a projectile point that lacerated the left subclavian artery, and that the attempted removal of the arrow at the time of death may have caused Ötzi to bleed to death. The projectile has long been known about, but, until now, the actual cause of death has been speculative.
2. Ötzi’s movements in the last day or two of his life are confirmed by analysis of ingesta and pollen samples. He, apparently ate two different meals since he had two different kinds of meat in his digestive system that were at different stages of digestion and pollen samples could be forensically traced to specific regions near the site of his death.

Specifically, Ötzi was in a subalpine region some distance above the Schnals and/or Etsch valleys where he walked to and was present about 9-12 hours before his death. Seven to four hours later, Ötzi was again in a subalpine coniferous forest where he consumed his last meal and then he climbed to the Tisen Pass where he died. Basically, he was in the highlands, went down to the valley, and then back up to the highlands again in a matter of hours. His last hours were both hectic and violent.

Where he was, what he ate, and the shot in the back of the shoulder with an arrow are all things that can be forensically revealed. Why he was where he was and why he was shot, to those questions we can only speculate. But sometimes, as long as we don’t attempt to establish them as truths, speculations can be the fun parts of archaeology.

Further Reading (keep an eye out for them):

• Oeggl, K., et al (2007). The reconstruction of the last itinerary of “Ötzi “, the Neolithic Iceman, by pollen analyses from sequentially sampled gut extracts. Quaternary Sciences Review, article in press.
• Pernter, P. et al (2007). Radiologic proof for the Iceman’s cause of death (ca. 5,300 BP), Journal of Archaeological Sciences, article in press.