Abstract
Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala, now known as Antigua Guatemala, held significant importance as a center of Spanish colonialism in the Maya highlands. Over the span of 300 years, serving as the capital of the Audiencia de Guatemala, it hosted a culturally and socially diverse population consisting of European settlers, Maya and Mexican natives, Mestizos, and individuals of African descent. This article offers an exploration of human-animal interactions within this multicultural environment through the zooarchaeological analysis of 11 sites across the colonial town. The findings of this first study on the archaeology of humans and animals in the post-Columbian Guatemalan highlands shed light on the intricate relationships between diverse human communities and animals, along with the changes and continuities in animal utilization among the Maya natives during this particular historical period.
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Data Availability
All zooarchaeological data (identifications, quantifications) are publicly available on the Open Context repository of the Mesoamerican Cattle Project: https://opencontext.org/projects/90e4c62f-5b51-4891-a7af-dd77c1e1a00f (Delsol 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.6078/M798854T).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Consejo para la Proteccion de la Antigua, Guatemala for granting authorization for this research project and for their invaluable support throughout. I extend my special thanks to Arquitecto Norman Muñoz, Licenciada Claudia Wolley, and Licenciada Gabriela Luna for their key support and assistance. I am also deeply grateful to the dedicated archaeologists and fieldworkers who conducted the fieldwork and meticulously collected the faunal remains. Their expertise and hard work were instrumental in the success of this study. I would like to acknowledge the guidance and mentorship provided by Kitty Emery throughout the course of this research. Her expertise and insights have greatly contributed to the development and execution of this study as part of my doctoral research. Financial support for this project was generously provided by the University of Florida Anthropology Department and the Florida Museum of Natural History. I would also like to acknowledge the National Science Foundation for their support through the Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award # 1930628. We are grateful to all individuals and institutions who have contributed to this research in various ways. Their support has been invaluable in the completion of this study.
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Delsol, N. “The Valley is full of Sheep and Other Cattel”: the Zooarchaeology of Humans and Animals in Colonial Antigua, Guatemala. Int J Histor Archaeol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-023-00714-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-023-00714-6