Hunting and husbandry at Teotihuacan, Mexico: an application of zooarchaeology, zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, and stable isotopes to animal economies in an ancient city of the Americas

Teotihuacan, Mexico, is an example of an early city that supported a substantial population in the absence of large, domesticated animals. This dissertation examines the diverse animal acquisition strategies employed by Teotihuacan’s inhabitants as part of the urban subsistence economy during its apogee (c. 200-550 CE). It integrates zooarchaeological methodologies with proteomic and isotopic techniques to analyze faunal material recovered from Tlajinga and Tlailotlacan, two neighborhoods on the urban periphery. The study has three components. The first component employs Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) to examine the archaeological remains of birds at Tlajinga. It presents the first major set of avian collagen peptide biomarkers and demonstrates the utility of ZooMS for identifying birds to family and sub-family levels. This technique provides the means to categorize archaeological bird remains, which demonstrates that the residents of Tlajinga had access to a diversity of aquatic birds, illustrating lake exploitation in Teotihuacan’s urban subsistence. The second component analyzes excavated animal remains in two adjacent apartment compounds in the Tlajinga district to understand urban subsistence. It documents how animal consumption varies over space, while controlling for factors that affect taxonomic composition, such as depositional context, excavation strategies, wealth, and cultural affiliations. It appears that the variability found among different faunal assemblages at Teotihuacan may be due to local hunting practices and the choice of which activity areas of the residential compounds were excavated, rather than wealth differences among households. The third component examines the role of animals in the urban economy of Tlailotlacan and Tlajinga using new isotopic data from turkeys, deer, rabbits, and hares. The residents of these two neighborhoods employed diversified strategies to acquire wild animals for urban consumption from multiple natural and anthropogenic niches around the city. Hunting and trapping wild animals was supplemented with lake resources from the extensive lacustrine system in the Basin of Mexico, and small-scale turkey husbandry. Overall, Teotihuacan’s animal economy is relevant to understanding diversity in global urban subsistence systems; it reflects a diversified system of animal production at the household level, distinct from the specialized, and often institutionalized, large-animal economies that supported preindustrial Afro-Eurasian cities.2024-10-03T00:00:00