Dear Zooarch list members,
Encouraged by the recent exchange concerning the interest in
questions and their answers to the list at large, I would like to
know if there are others working on collections containing Bos taurus
from fairly diverse (non-continental) sources.
I ask because my helper came to me today with a distal 1st phalange
fragment from Bos taurus. We entered into a discussion about
potential identification problems in my collection that might/will
arise because most of my comparative material is from modern beef and
dairy cattle, my books/articles refer primarily to modern or Roman
European (and mostly British at that!) cattle, but our collection is
from Spanish colonial cows in California (ca. 1769-1835)--stock that
comes (by foot mostly) from Baja California many generations removed
from peninsular Spanish origins, via Cuba and Mexico. The modern
comparative sample and the archaeological sample were similar enough
to me, but my assistant pointed out slight differences in
"gracileness" that I had trouble accounting for (eg., the comparative
samples are a little more "lightly built" than the archaeological
material). There was indeed an almost total replacement of the cattle
population as a result of the Gold Rush of 1849 and the annexation of
Mexican California to the United States. Modern cows here are more
often dairy and beef types and differ from the "criollo" (eg. Texas
Longhorn types), at least cranially. I understand why there are
differences ("free-ranging cattle, some castrates, sex and age,
etc...) but I realized that I had not seen much literature (save for
a discussion by Sherri Gust) on the effects of breed, relocation and
ranching style (penning vs. free-ranging). Can anyone share more
information or refer me to more literature, even if it might be
rudimentary for many list readers?
Thanks in advance....I hope that the results are broadly interesting.
Sincerely,
Karin P. Dunwoody
Grad. student
Dept. of Archaeology, Boston University
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