The zooarchaeology course at the Natural History Museum Los Angeles County (NHMLA) is designed to be a fun and diverse learning experience. The hands-on zooarchaeological instruction will take place at the Archaeological Laboratory at NHMLA, but we take full advantage of the unique museum setting. We provide introductions to various museum careers, behind-the-scenes tours to multiple museum departments and collections (e.g., mammalogy, ornithology, taxidermy, scanning electron microscope lab) and see how faunal specimens are displayed in the main museum public exhibits (e.g., Dinosaur Hall, Age of Mammals). We also provide an introduction to paleontology with an instruction day at the La Brea Tar Pits.

Did you know that faunal remains are one of the most abundant finds in archaeological sites? Zooarchaeology, the analysis of animal bones from archaeological sites can shed light on human behavior, diet, economic and hunting strategies as well as natural and cultural site formation processes. We will learn the most current techniques for describing, classifying and analyzing archaeological animal bones and we will discuss faunal assemblages from archaeological sites in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas.

The first half of the course will focus on learning skeletal anatomy and identifying skeletal elements of modern animal species. The second half of the course will be devoted to working on zooarchaeological assemblages from sites in southern California. We will practice identifying, classifying, and cataloging faunal remains and taphonomic agents. We will build a zooarchaeological database, conduct data analysis and write a faunal report based on zooarchaeological data we collected.

This program is lab based. No excavations will take place, we will focus on methodological analysis of faunal remains in a lab setting.