USING DENTAL MICROWEAR TEXTURE ANALYSIS TO INVESTIGATE THE SCAVENGING BEHAVIOR OF LATE-PREHISTORIC DOMESTIC DOGS IN NORTH AMERICA

The dietary behavior of domestic dogs living in North America prior to European contact is often assumed to be that of a scavenger. This project tests this assumption by investigating the diets of Late-Prehistoric domestic dogs via dental microwear texture analysis (i.e., features on the tooth surface that indicate types of foods consumed). With the understanding that canids process more bone when scavenging off carcasses, these data show that the majority of domestic dogs examined for this study were not processing large amounts of bone, but had access to less hard and/or tough foods, and the case is made that certain dogs were consuming soft, likely cooked, foods. This study employs Dental Microwear Texture Analysis (DMTA), which uses three-dimensional tooth surface data coupled with scale-sensitive fractal analysis for an unbiased interpretation of microwear signatures. In order to understand the array of possible domestic dog dietary behavior, their diets are compared to their unmodified wild progenitor, the gray wolf. A robust baseline of wolf dietary behavior via microwear has been collected from a collection of modern wolves housed at the Draper Natural History Museum. Teeth from curated domestic dogs representing archaeological sites in Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming are evaluated to interpret feeding practices employed by their human caregivers. Comparing domestic dogs, whose dietary behavior is in question, with gray wolves, whose dietary behavior is known, this research evaluates the degree to which prehistoric dogs scavenged for bone, and contributes to a better understanding of human-to-canine provisioning strategies in the past.