Integrating faunal and botanical remains using multivariate statistics to reconstruct (pre)historic subsistence developments

Abstract

Archaeological faunal and botanical remains are often treated and published separately to understand past subsistence practices. This distinction is an arbitrary one based on methodological differences, especially since we know from ethnological sources that animal husbandry and crop cultivation are usually interdependent in agricultural systems. Here, we use correspondence, detrended correspondence, and canonical correspondence analyses to integrate these different lines of evidence. We customise this method by: • Adjusting criteria to select and prepare data for integration. • Including independent parameters such as chronology and mean annual precipitation to study relationships. • Presenting additional visualisations of data to aid interpretation. The customised method we present can be applied to any time period, geographical region or research question, as long as botanical and faunal data are available. By analysing these data in an integrative way, we can improve our knowledge of subsistence and agriculture, which in turn can provide a context to better understand social and political changes in past societies.