Zooarchaeological investigation of the Hoabinhian exploitation of reptiles and amphibians in Thailand and Cambodia with a focus on the Yellow-headed Tortoise (Indotestudo elongata(Blyth, 1854))

Abstract

Although non-marine turtles are nearly ubiquitous in the Southeast Asian archaeological record, their zooarchaeological study has been very poorly undertaken in that tropical region of the world. This lack of study makes the understanding of past human subsistence strategies very complex especially regarding the prehistoric hunter gatherer populations which may have massively exploited inland chelonian taxa. In order to try to start a new dynamic regarding the study of the past human-turtle interactions in Southeast Asia we propose here an in-depth zooarchaeological analysis of the turtle bone remains recovered from four Hoabinhian Hunter-gatherer archaeological assemblages located in Thailand and Cambodia, and dated from the Late Pleistocene to the first half of the Holocene. Our study is focused on the bone remains attributed to the Yellow-Headed Tortoise (Indotestudo elongata) as they account for the majority of the turtle archaeological assemblages identified in the target area. For this species, we developed osteo-metric equations enabling the estimation of the carapace size of the archaeological individuals of this species. This allowed us to study the size structure of the archaeological populations in the different sites and to reveal the human exploitation strategies of these animals. We found a strong taphonomic homogeneity between the studied assemblages suggesting similarities of the subsistence behaviors in the different sites despite their very different environmental settings. We thus hypothesize putative cultural similarities across time and space. In addition, we also provide a baseline for future zooarchaeological studies as well as a methodological frame for the detailed studies of archaeological turtle bones in continental Southeast Asia.