Ancient dog diets on the Pacific Northwest Coast: zooarchaeological and stable isotope modelling evidence from Tseshaht territory and beyond

The history of Coast Salish "woolly dogs" revealed by ancient genomics and Indigenous Knowledge

Ancestral Coast Salish societies in the Pacific Northwest kept long-haired "woolly dogs" that were bred and cared for over millennia. However, the dog wool-weaving tradition declined during the 19th century, and the population was lost. In this study, we analyzed genomic and isotopic data from a preserved woolly dog pelt from "Mutton," collected in 1859. Mutton is the only known example of an Indigenous North American dog with dominant precolonial ancestry postdating the onset of settler colonialism. We identified candidate genetic variants potentially linked with their distinct woolly phenotype. We integrated these data with interviews from Coast Salish Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and weavers about shared traditional knowledge and memories surrounding woolly dogs, their importance within Coast Salish societies, and how colonial policies led directly to their disappearance.

Human and dog Bayesian dietary mixing models using bone collagen stable isotope ratios from ancestral Iroquoian sites in southern Ontario

Under the archaeological canine surrogacy approach (CSA) it is assumed that because dogs were reliant on humans for food, they had similar diets to the people with whom they lived. As a result, the stable isotope ratios of their tissues (bone collagen and apatite, tooth enamel and dentine collagen) will be close to those of the humans with whom they cohabited. Therefore, in the absence of human tissue, dog tissue isotopes can be used to help reconstruct past human diets. Here δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N ratios on previously published dog and human bone collagen from fourteenth-seventeenth century AD ancestral Iroquoian village archaeological sites and ossuaries in southern Ontario are used with MixSIAR, a Bayesian dietary mixing model, to determine if the dog stable isotope ratios are good proxies for human isotope ratios in dietary modeling for this context. The modeling results indicate that human dietary protein came primarily from maize and high trophic level fish and dogs from maize, terrestrial animals, low trophic level fish, and human feces. While isotopes from dog tissues can be used as general analogs for human tissue isotopes under CSA, greater insights into dog diets can be achieved with Bayesian dietary mixing models.