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. / 2024-10-03T00:00:00Z

Yes / Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) are ecological and cultural keystone species along the Northwest Coast of North America and are ubiquitous in archaeological sites of the region. The inability to morphologically identify salmonid post-cranial remains to species, however, can limit our understanding of the ecological and cultural role different taxa played in the seasonal subsistence practices of Indigenous groups in the past. Here, we present a rapid, cost-effective ZooMS method to distinguish salmonid species based on collagen peptide mass-fingerprinting. Using modern reference material and an assemblage of 28 DNA-identified salmonid bones from the pre-contact Yup'ik site of Nunalleq, Western Alaska, we apply high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) to identify a series of potential collagen peptide markers to distinguish Pacific salmon. We then confirm these peptide markers with a blind ZooMS analysis (MALDI-TOF-MS) of the archaeological remains. We successfully distinguish five species of anadromous salmon with this ZooMS approach, including one specimen that could not be identified through ancient DNA analysis. Our biomolecular identification of chum (43%), sockeye (21%), chinook (18%), coho (11%) and pink (7%), confirm the exploitation of all five available species of salmonid at Nunalleq.

Leather has been one of the most common crafting materials in human history. With its incredible versatility it has been used for clothes, shelter, books, armour, containers, decoration, and everything in between. The boat graves from Valsgärde presents a for the time period large amount of preserved leather, allowing us to have a peek into how it was used during the late Scandinavian Iron Age. This essay focuses on which animals have been used in the making of these objects and what the choice of raw material and visible crafting skills might tell us. A total of 54 samples from the Valsgärde boat graves were analysed using the ZooMS method. Additionally, tanning methods and other related processes are discussed. The main conclusions are that while the choice of material has an important impact on the final result, it seems like the skills of the craftsperson was the most important factor affecting quality and exclusivity for an item. / Läder har varit ett av de vanligaste materialen i mänsklighetens historia. Med sin fantastiska mångsidighet har det använts till kläder, bostäder, böcker, rustningar, behållare, dekoration, och allt däremellan. Båtgravarna i Valsgärde erbjuder en för tidsperioden stor mängd bevarat läder vilket ger oss chansen att få en glimt av hur materialet användes under den sena järnåldern i Skandinavien. Den här uppsatsen fokuserar på vilka djur som använts för att tillverka dessa föremål och vad valet av råmaterial och hantverkmetoder kan säga oss. Totalt har 54 prov från Valsgärdes båtgravar analyserats med ZooMS-metoden. Därtill behandlas garvning och andra relaterade processer i läderhantverk. De huvudsakliga slutsatserna är att även om valet av råmaterial har en stor inverkan på slutresultatet så verkar hantverkarens skicklighet vara den viktigaste faktorn för kvalitet och exklusivitet i ett föremål. / <p>This thesis was made possible through funding from Västgöta Nation.</p>

Photographic fisheye lenses with fixed focal length for cameras with different sensor formats have been well developed for decades. However, photographic fisheye lenses with variable focal length are rare on the market due in part to the greater design difficulty. This paper presents a large aperture zoom fisheye lens for DSLR cameras that produces both circular and diagonal fisheye imaging for 35-mm sensors and diagonal fisheye imaging for APS-C sensors. The history and optical characteristics of fisheye lenses are briefly reviewed. Then, a 9.2- to 16.1-mm F/2.8 to F/3.5 zoom fisheye lens design is presented, including the design approach and aberration control. Image quality and tolerance performance analysis for this lens are also presented. (C) 2017 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

Ce projet contribue aux discussions en cours sur la transition du Paléolithique moyen au Paléolithique supérieur en Europe occidentale marquée par un tournant dans l’évolution de notre espèce, l’Homo sapiens. Alors que les Néandertaliens, nos plus proches cousins évolutionnaires disparaissent du registre fossile, les humains modernes qui ont migré hors d’Afrique, se dispersent rapidement à travers l’Eurasie. Les deux populations étaient exposées aux mêmes changements climatiques dramatiques caractéristiques de la transition, et pourtant, les Néandertaliens sont rapidement remplacés par les humains modernes. Par conséquent, ce phénomène suggère que les populations humaines modernes auraient pu être mieux adaptées face aux changements environnementaux. Puisque le régime alimentaire est un bon moniteur de l’adaptation, cette recherche compare les stratégies de subsistance des deux espèces humaines ayant tour à tour occupé le site de Riparo Bombrini (Balzi Rossi, Ligurie, Italie). Une analyse archéozoologique et taphonomique a été effectuée sur les collections fauniques du Moustérien tardif et du Proto-Aurignacien afin d’obtenir la première comparaison détaillée du régime alimentaire et des comportements de chasse des Néandertaliens et des humains modernes sur l’un des seuls sites du nord-ouest de l’Italie entièrement documenté avec des méthodes archéologiques modernes. Étant donné que la nature très fragmentée des ossements animaux sur le site a été un obstacle aux analyses fauniques dans le passé, les méthodes d’analyse archéozoologique ont été complétées par le « collagen fingerprinting » (c.-à-d. zooarchéologie par spectrométrie de masse, ou ZooMS) afin d’assurer l’identification d’un maximum de spécimens pour atteindre une précision accrue de l’identification taxonomique. La préservation différentielle du collagène dans les restes squelettiques a également justifié le développement d’une méthode novatrice de dépistage du collagène utilisant la spectroscopie FTIR-ATR pour la présélection d’échantillons ZooMS. Les résultats montrent que, tandis que Néandertal et Homo sapiens ont continuellement chassé les taxons ongulés disponibles à proximité de Riparo Bombrini, les niveaux de Moustérien tardif indiquent un rétrécissement du tableau de chasse associé à un mode de subsistance hyperlocal. En revanche, les spectres fauniques se sont considérablement élargis dans le plus ancien Proto-Aurignacien, lorsque Riparo Bombrini était occupé comme camp de base logistique à long terme associé à un vaste territoire de subsistance. Les résultats fournissent également les premières données détaillées sur la subsistance des populations humaines durant la transition dans la région de l’arc liguro-provençal, établissant ainsi de nouvelles hypothèses à tester dans de futurs travaux concernant la nature changeante de leurs écologies. / This project contributes to the ongoing debates over the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in Western Europe, which marks a turning point in the evolution of our species, Homo sapiens. While Neanderthals, our closest evolutionary relatives, went extinct at that time, modern humans who had migrated out of Africa dispersed very rapidly across Eurasia. While both populations were exposed to the same dramatic climatic shifts at the time, it is only the Neanderthals that quickly disappeared from the archeological record, suggesting that modern human populations may have been better adapted to react to environmental changes than Neanderthals. Since diet is a good monitor of adaptation, this research compares the subsistence strategies of both human groups as they occupied, in quick succession, the site of Riparo Bombrini (Balzi Rossi, Liguria, Italy). An archeozoological and taphonomic analysis was conducted on Late Mousterian and Proto-Aurignacian faunal collections to produce the first direct comparison between Neanderthal and modern human diets and hunting strategies at one of the only sites in Northwest Italy entirely excavated using modern documentation methods. Because the highly fragmented nature of the animal bones at the site has hindered faunal analysis in the past, these approaches were complemented by collagen fingerprinting (i.e., Zooarcheology by Mass Spectrometry, or ZooMS) to identify as many specimens as possible as to species, thus yielding unprecedented accuracy in taxonomic identification. The challenging collagen preservation state also required developing a screening method using FTIR-ATR spectroscopy prior to ZooMS. The results show that, while Neanderthals and modern humans continuously hunted prime-aged ungulate taxa available in a close range of Riparo Bombrini, the Late Mousterian levels indicate a narrower diet associated with a hyper-local subsistence range. In contrast, the faunal spectra broadened noticeably in the earliest Proto-Aurignacian, when Riparo Bombrini was occupied as a long-term logistical base camp within an extensive land-use strategy. The results also provide the first high-resolution view of human subsistence during the transition in the Liguro-Provençal arc region and set up test hypotheses about the changing nature of hominin behavioural ecology that can be further tested in future work.