Animal Bones and Teeth

Zooarchaeologists seek to answer questions about the human past using animal remains from the archaeological record. These researchers explore what people ate, what environments were like, the movements of animals across landscapes, relationships between people and animals, and more. In this talk Gillian Wong will dive into what it means to be a zooarchaeologist and how animal remains can be used to address several key questions in our understanding of the human past. She will draw specifically from her PhD work that uses the remains of micro-mammals, like rodents and insectivores, from Langmahdhalde, an archaeological site in southwestern Germany, to reconstruct climates and environments during the stone age. What kind of vegetation existed during this time and how cold was it? But more importantly, what implications does all this have for human settlement of the region?

About the Presenter

Gillian Wong is a PhD student in archaeology at the University of Tuebingen in Germany. Her specialty is zooarchaeology, or animal (faunal) remains in the archaeological record. She is primarily interested in using animal remains to explore how large-scale changes in climate affected prehistoric hunter-gatherers at the local level. Currently, she is the zooarchaeologist for a project in southwestern Germany that is excavating one of the first Magdalenian (~15,000 years before present) sites to be discovered in the region since the 1970s. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Utah. When she’s not doing archaeology, Gillian enjoys hiking with her dog and husband, swimming, and reading.

Date: Thursday, May 7, 2020
Time: 6:30 – 8 PM
Location: San Diego Archaeological Center
Cost: Included with paid museum admission ($2); Members Free