Research and Selected Publications

My research addresses Native American and European experiences in the early colonial period, particularly from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. I am interested in the consequences of European colonization of North America, specifically the introduction of Eurasian livestock into indigenous subsistence systems, the effect of livestock on North American landscapes, and the integration of indigenous labor into expanding European market economies. The technical approach that I take to this research is zooarchaeology, the study of non-human animal remains from archaeological contexts.

Southeastern Historical Zooarchaeology

Before arriving at the University of Arizona, my research program focused on the early historic period in southeastern North America. At the site of the Upper Creek Native American village of Fusihatchee, in Alabama, I found that the Creeks were heavily involved as commodity producers in the expanding European market economy. Relationships between Creeks and Europeans were primarily structured by economic interactions. The Creeks furnished deerskins for what was an eighteenth-century world economic system that tied the leatherworking industries of England and France to Creek labor in the Southeast. The Creeks maintained an important role as deerskin producers until the turn of the nineteenth century when loss of land to white encroachment, among other factors, lead the waning and collapse of the deerskin trade. The Creeks lost their primary access to European-manufactured finished goods on which they depended, and the loss of land made hunting wild game an increasingly untenable strategy. Low frequencies of introduced Eurasian domesticated livestock in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that the Creeks obtained small quantities of meat from domesticated livestock through trade or the hunting of feral livestock, but not through their own husbandry efforts. My research at Fusihatchee indicates that by the turn of the nineteenth century, the Creeks began to replace hunting with husbandry. This research was published in 2007 by American Antiquity.

I am also a collaborator in the multidisciplinary Apalachicola Ecosystems Project (AEP) team, which was recently the recipient of a collaborative National Science Foundation grant to examine Lower Creek cultural change and ecological interactions during the colonial period. My portion of the collaborative project will fund zooarchaeological analysis of materials excavated from the Lower Creek villages of Apalachicola Old Town and Apalachicola New Town. The first field season under the new grant funding was completed in July, 2011.

My southeastern research also addresses the lives of the colonizers. The eighteenth-century presidio Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Los Adaes served as the capital of Spanish Texas from 1729-1772, and was the easternmost settlement in Spanish Texas (now Louisiana). Dr. Diana Loren and I explored food and tableware remains from two mestizo households, located outside the presidio, and the governor’s house, located inside the presidio walls. The Spanish colonial authorities held expectations with regard to diet and material culture based on ethnicity. Social status was ascribed according to the Spanish concept of racial “purity.” Those with more Spanish ancestry were expected to dress, behave, and eat in ways that were different from subjects with predominantly Native American or African heritage. Diana's research shows that elite households attempted to maintain a household in keeping with Spanish colonial expectations with regard to material culture, while my research indicates that their diet often included less desirable foods, differing little from that of their lower-status mestizo neighbors. This research is currently awaiting publication by the International Journal of Historical Archaeology

 Southwestern Historical Zooarchaeology

Since arriving at the University of Arizona, I have expanded my geographical focus into the Southwest, specifically the Spanish colonial period in northern Sonora and southern Arizona (a region known to the Spanish as the Pimería Alta). I have recently complete zooarchaeological analyses at two Pimería Alta missions, Mission San Agustín del Tucson and Mission Nuestra Señora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocóspera. Research at San Agustín, supported by Desert Archaeology, Inc., indicates that the O’odham Native Americans at the mission were primarily dependent upon animal husbandry, not hunting. This research was recently published, with co-author Vincent LaMotta, in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.

Zooarchaeological research at San Agustín is the first large (N = 7,933), full-scale zooarchaeological analysis from a Pimería Alta mission that was excavated with the benefit of screening. The analyzed assemblage from Mission Cocóspera is nearly as large (N = 6,406). A high degree of fragmentation, green-bone fracturing, and other assemblage characteristics suggest that the missionized O’odham in the region were involved in tallow processing, likely for the manufacture of candles and soap that were in high demand locally, and by mining communities in northern Sonora. The zooarchaeological evidence from San Agustín and Cocóspera places O’odham labor at the missions within a regional economic context. A publication presenting this research appeared recently in American Antiquity.

In April 2007, I was awarded a University of Arizona Faculty Small Grant to test the applicability of stable isotope analyses to the reconstruction of livestock grazing practices at eighteenth-century missions.

Zooarchaeology and Wildlife Conservation

In 2004, Mr. Richard Lange, Dr. E. Charles Adams and myself received funding from the Arizona Game and Fish Department for a project entitled “Conservation Applications of Archaeological Data". In collaboration with AZSITE, the state site files, we created a GIS-linked database of zooarchaeological remains from the state of Arizona, dubbed “FaunAZ”. Wildlife managers can use the database for information on the historic ranges of vertebrate species as reflected by their presence in archaeological sites. The database and GIS data was designed so that the project can be made available for public access, providing valuable public exposure to archaeological research in Arizona. An article about FaunAZ was recently published in a special issue of the Society for American Archaeology's Archaeological Record.

Click here to access FaunAZ!

Selected Publications

Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet (2011) Rendering Economies: Native American Labor and Secondary Animal Products in the Eighteenth-Century Pimería Alta. American Antiquity 76(1):3-23.

Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet, Rick Karl and John F. Chamblee (2011) FaunAZ: Arizona's Archaeofaunal Index. The SAA Archaeological Record 11(1):33-36.

Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet (2010) Animal Husbandry at Pimería Alta Missions: El Ganado en el Sudoeste de Norteamérica. In Anthropological Approaches to Zooarchaeology: Colonialism, Complexity and Animal Transformations, edited by Douglas V. Campana, Pam J. Crabtree, Susan D. deFrance, Justin Lev-Tov and Alice M. Choyke, pp. 150-158. Oxbow Books, Oxford.

Reitz, Elizabeth J., Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, Daniel C. Weinand, and wyneth A. Duncan (2010) Mission and Pueblo of Santa Catalina de Guale, St. Catherines Island, Georgia: A Comparative Zooarchaeological Analysis.  Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, No. 91, New York, NY. 

Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet (2007) Deerskins and Domesticates: Creek Subsistence and Economic Strategies in the Historic Period. American Antiquity 72(1):5-33.

Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet and Vincent M. LaMotta (2007) Missionization and Economic Change in the Pimería Alta: The Zooarchaeology of San Agustín de Tucson. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 11(3):241-268.

Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet and Elizabeth J. Reitz (2006) Introduction and Adoption of Eurasian Livestock in North America. In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 3: Environment, Origins, and Population, edited by Douglas Ubelaker, pp. 485-491. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.

Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet 2000 Vertebrate Subsistence in the Mississippian-Historic Period Transition. Southeastern Archaeology 19(2):135-144.

Pavao, Barnet and Peter W. Stahl (1999) Structural Density Assays of Leporid Skeletal Elements with Implications for Taphonomic, Actualistic and Archaeological Research. Journal of Archaeological Science 26(1):53-66. 

Email Pavao-Z. for more information.

University of Arizona / Arizona State Museum / School of Anthropology