SAS Webinar

Saturday, April 10, 2021

2:00 p.m.

‘Evaluating the Dog as A Hunting Tool in Prehistoric Alta and Baja California: Preliminary Results’

by Jessica Morales

California hunter-gatherer(-fishers) archaeology has long focused in understanding forager decision making related to mobility, residency, subsistence practices, and technology. Notably, stone tools have dominated the discussion of technology in relation to human adaptation through time and space. Jessica’s dissertation project aims to bring dogs to the discussion of tools employed by California hunter-gatherers. The goals of Jessica’s study are to (1) identify dogs from other canids in the archaeological record, (2) identify hunting dogs from other dogs, and (3) examine changes in key prey before and after the adoption of dogs. The first step involves a combination of traditional zooarchaeological methods, geometric morphometrics, and stable isotopes. This first step is crucial to begin to address the second and third steps. The preliminary results of the first step are presented in this webinar.

Jessica Morales is a graduate student at University of California Davis. She received an M.A. from California State University, Los Angeles in 2019 and a scholarship from SAS in 2020 to support her hunting dogs research..