Songs of the past - papers of the 10th ICAZ Bird Working Group Meeting

Abstract

This special issue of The International Journal of Osteoarchaeology includes papers that were initially delivered orally or as posters at the 10th International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) Bird Working Group, which took place on June 5–6, 2021. The meeting was organized and hosted by Hanneke Meijer, Samuel Walker, Liselotte Takken-Beijersbergen, Anne Karin Hufthammer, and Olaug Flatnes Bratbak from the University Museum of Bergen, University of Bergen, Norway, and Ramona Harrison from the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen, Norway.

Despite our enthusiasm and plans for hosting this meeting in Bergen on the beautiful Norwegian west coast, reality turned out to be very different from what any of us had hoped for. Due to the arrival of the COVID-19 virus in 2020 and the concomitant worldwide restrictions to travel and in-person gatherings, scientific conferences had made a drastic shift to being held online only. As the only other option would be to cancel the meeting, we decided to move the 10th ICAZ Bird Working Group meeting online as well. This was the first time in history that a BWG Meeting was hosted digitally. Despite the uncertainty about whether or not such a digital conference would really work, we were also happy to have this opportunity to come together to support one another as scholars and friends.

A big part of conferences is the social aspect that can be hard to recreate during digital events. With support of the Bergen University Fund, we were able to host the meeting through the digital platform Gather. This allowed us to add a unique social aspect to the meeting by providing an online social space where participants could interact with other participants as well as groups of other colleagues and meet new people. In this way, the treasured social side of an in-person meeting could be experienced in a digital way. The poster session was also set up in a digital space and allowed attendants to wander around virtually and peruse the posters. Although a virtual conference can be a learning curve for everyone, we luckily experienced only a few minor technical glitches.

During the two conference days, 32 oral presentations and 11 poster presentations were given, representing the fascinating breadth of research on the relationships between birds and humans. Posters and oral presentations covered the exploitation of birds by humans from the Paleolithic to the Post-Medieval period, methodologies to help identify bird remains, the paleoecological implications of past bird bone assemblages, and the symbolic roles that birds play in human societies. More than 120 participants registered for this meeting, including many students who experienced the science and collegiality of our meeting for the first time. We were particularly pleased to see several conference participants from South America, Africa, and Asia, for whom an in-person meeting in Bergen might have been difficult to attend due to financial reasons. From the organizing committee's perspective, this conference was a great success. We also received very positive feedback from the participants, and we are pleased that it was an exciting and informative experience for all. Given the inclusive nature of a digital conference, we hope that future meetings will also include a digital component, so researchers across the world can participate in, and benefit from, our meetings.

The relationship between humans and birds is an ancient one, extending as far back as the Middle Pleistocene, and possibly even further. Throughout human history, birds were exploited as food, represented a means of finding food, provided tools and decorations, were symbolized in myths and legends, and were sources of wonder and entertainment. Even though the human–bird relationship might have been more important during the past than it is today, the increase in popularity of birdwatching, particularly in urban areas, observed during the COVID-19 pandemic (Basile et al., 2021; Randler et al., 2020) demonstrates that we still turn towards birds as a source of recreation and comfort. In this special volume, the evidence for the multifaceted relationship between humans and birds in the archaeological record is explored in 20 papers. The range of geographical areas and time periods covered, as well as the approaches and methodologies employed, is a testament to the breadth and diversity of the ICAZ Bird Working Group.

The taxonomic identification of bird bones can be daunting, but is perhaps the most important and first step in any analysis of an avian bone assemblage, as it forms the very basis of our knowledge and the foundation of our interpretations of the human–bird relationship. Several excellent guides and papers exist on identifying bird bones for certain groups and geographic regions, but there are still important gaps to fill. Krzysztof Wertz and colleagues (Wertz et al., 2023) have made a valuable contribution to this issue with their identification key for ungual phalanges of European owls and falcons. A second paper with an identification key for ungual phalanges of Accipitridae has been published separately (Bochenski et al., 2023) but deserves mention here as well. In addition to taxonomic identifications, distinguishing domestic forms from their wild ancestors can be challenging. The emergence of geometric morphometrics, an approach that quantitatively assesses morphological variation, might prove to be very helpful. In this volume, Oueslati and Gruwier (2023) apply a combination of linear measurements and geometric morphometric to differentiate between wild and domestic goose populations.

Our ancestors lived in a world that was much richer in bird species than the one we live in today. The study of extinct species therefore provides archaeological and paleoecological data that we cannot glean from living birds. Furthermore, as bird species continue to decline as a result of changing climates and increasing human impacts, investigating how birds responded to past environmental changes can predict how birds might respond to ongoing and future environmental change. Several papers in this volume focus on extinct and extirpated species. Hufthammer and Hufthammer (2023) provide the first overview of giant auk (Pinguinus impennis) remains from Norway and show that this species was already in decline during the Holocene. Albarella et al. (2023) review the Holocene evidence for the presence of Eagle Owls (Bubo bubo) in Britain and its status as a native species. Orchard et al. (2023) use a GIS-approach of zooarchaeological sites to explore temporal patterns in Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) abundance. Lastly, Silva-Martínez et al. (2023) investigate changes in body size, an important factor in a bird's ecology, in fossil and modern birds in the Yucatán since the Late Pleistocene. When it comes to understanding the processes that have shaped the current distributions and abundances of birds, it is important to keep in mind that distributional ranges are not always a result of only natural processes. For example, Meijer et al. (2023) show that red junglefowl on Flores (Indonesia) reached the island, and potentially the whole of Wallacea, through human-mediated dispersal. Similarly, Cruz et al. (2023) show that remains of military macaws found in Cueva de Avendaños, Chihuahua, do not represent a range expansion of the species, but rather signals long-distance trade and subsequent animal husbandry. Thus, caution is warranted when assuming a species is native to a region because of the presence of the species' bones in the archaeological record.

When it comes to understanding the ways past humans interacted with bird species, taphonomy provides us with a framework to understand the origins of an avian bone assemblage, be it humans, mammalian, or avian predators. However, the mere co-occurrence of humans and birds does not necessarily mean any interaction between the two. An analysis of the bird remains from the Middle Pleistocene level TE9d at Sima del Elefante in Spain by Marqueta et al. (2023) shows that despite the presence of hominins, raptors were the main accumulating agents of the avian assemblage. Goffette et al. (2023) use an experimental approach to test hypotheses regarding the origin of an assemblage of duck radiuses, whether it is anthropogenic or natural, from the early Gravettian site of Maisières-Canal in Belgium. Worked bird bones are relatively rare in assemblages. A study by Vitezović and colleagues (Vitezović et al., 2023) describes a rare bird bone artefact produced from the radius of a swan, from the Early Bronze Age site Zók in Hungary, and interprets its possible practical and ritual uses. The range of bird taxa recovered from a site, their abundance, and their body part representation provides important information about the ways birds were exploited. This is a theme that is explored within a number of papers within this special issue. For Viking Age Iceland, Cesario and Steinberg (2023) show that differential body part representations of alcids and ptarmigans represent differences in seasonal availability and different butchering strategies. The often restrictive and self-reliant diet of religious sites can be reflected in the bird bone assemblage by low species diversity and relatively high percentage of domestic species, as shown by Lloveras et al. (2023) for the 14th–19th century assemblage of the Monastery of Santa Maria de Pedralbes Barcelona, Spain. However, Gál (2023) points out in her overview of avian assemblages from ecclesiastical sites in Hungary, which show a rather large variety in species, that differences in recovery methods and analysis play an important role in the abundance and diversity of species recovered from a site. The relative diversity and abundance of birds can also be interpreted as indicative of social status, as demonstrated by the presence of hawks and falcons for hunting, an activity for the elite, in Vilnius Lower Castle, Lithuania (Ehrlich et al., 2023), and within the Volga River Basin (Shaymuratova et al., 2023), and the presence of an exotic peacock, likely an ornamental species, in the medieval site of Carrer de Sotstinent Navarro in Barcelona, Spain (Fernández et al., 2023). In terms of ritualistic uses of birds, Corbino and Demarchi (2023) describe a bird bone assemblage from the temple of Isis in Pompeii and interpret the presence of immature chicken remains, an abundance of meaty body parts and chicken eggshell identified through ancient protein analysis, as indicative of a ritualistic offer. For the Moche period in Peru, Alaica (2023) shows that while zooarchaeological data suggest only a minor role for birds in human diet, their strong presence in Moche iconographic records illustrates their role in rituals and ceremonies.

It is important to note here that although the papers in this volume are predominantly based on traditional zooarchaeology, it is exciting to see that many, arguably most, authors draw knowledge from a variety of different disciplines and methodologies. Biomolecular methods, such as ancient DNA and proteomics, have increased tremendously in popularity, and Corbino and Demarchi (2023) apply proteomics to the problem of identifying eggshells. The use of geometric morphometrics (Oueslati & Gruwier, 2023), a technique that has only been applied rarely to birds, might prove to be very useful in distinguishing closely related species. The GIS-based approach by Orchard et al. (2023) provides a promising avenue to study large-scale patterns in species distributions. Literary and iconographic evidence remain important sources of information for understanding past human–animal relationships, as demonstrated in several papers (e.g., Alaica, 2023; Fernández et al., 2023; Lloveras et al., 2023). With regard to future literary sources of avian zooarchaeology, Dirrigl and White (2023) developed useful guidance and best practices for authors that can increase author readership and stimulate the dissemination of bird paleontology, archaeology, and taphonomy research.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.