00:00.00 archpodnet Welcome back to episode one one of a life and ruins podcast we're talking with Dr Angela Perry and we wanted to start this segment off by just kind of chatting about your dissertation work. So could you give us maybe the the elevator speech of what. You ended up studying as part of your dissertation. 00:17.74 Angela Yes I studied. Um and I always tell my students have your elevator speech ready and here's me failing miserably? Um, what I did was I looked at a comparison of 3 areas across the world. Japan Northern Europe and the midsouth of the us and I looked at whether people used dogs as hunting adaptations to climate change related to the transition plythene hocene transition. So essentially I noticed that there are lots of dog burials that all looked exactly the same. And the burials looked very kind of hunting dog-like they were buried with hunting stuff and they're with people who were in very similar environments kind of these deciduous broadlyaf forests that kind of arose with the holocene transition and people who are hunting largely whitetail deer and bore in these forests. And had transitioned very rapidly through that climatic change from either polar tundra or boreal forests into these kind of rapidly expanding warm forests with these completely different prey species and essentially it looked like that they were using dogs as a way to adapt. To new environments and new prey and that once these hunting dogs died that they were burying in them in these very elaborate ways and that the same thing was happening kind of across the board in these 3 areas looked very very similar and in all areas it stopped once agriculture came in so it looked very similar and very. Closely associated with hunter gatherers. 01:55.82 David That that's freaking cool. Um did um I think any us have published there. 01:59.95 Angela Have I published that paper yet. No this is what happens when you when you do a Ph D like you're so tired of the topic that you just it's a decade later and you just can't bring yourself to publish that Ph d. 02:14.11 David Yeah, last I told Bob about my um district or my thesis I told him it was in review but I had never submitted it but he kept asking me. Um, we'll get there there you go? yeah, did that. 02:22.21 Angela Yeah. 02:24.21 archpodnet So it's in it's it's internal review. That's what it is yeah. 02:27.18 Angela Yeah, it's coming. 02:33.22 David Did that um like so the research he did there. It was like some ethnographic stuff in Japan or was it more like like looking at data and then analyzing it. But. 02:39.97 Angela Yeah, so I spent ah ah a large portion of time in Japan during that I mean a very good excuse to just go spend a bunch of time in Japan and one of the things I wanted to do while I was there is like you know people who hunt bore. 02:52.95 David Hell yeah. 02:57.91 Angela Tell me like there's nothing like hunting boar like it's a very unique experience and you have to do it. You have to understand how people are using dogs in the field and I've done it with hunters in the Midsouth. So in Alabama and various places in the mid-south and I done it with hunters in Sweden and other places. Mostly deer though and so when I went to Japan I went out with some hunters hunting in Japan is very difficult now. It's a very expensive sport because gun licenses and all of that is like a long process. So. It's not definitely not like hunting the way a jamone hunter gatherer would hunt right? But we. We definitely went out and went boar hunting and it was like a freight train that you can't see coming at you through a dense forest. It was intense and you immediately see why people use dogs you you can't find the boar alone in a forest without them. Um, the dogs like sniff them out immediately. Soon as they get their trail. They go running after them and essentially corral them and then just bark and bark and bark and bark and bark until you find them and then you kill the boar I mean when you go hunting with with dogs. You realize why people use dogs to. Because hunting without dogs is a lot harder in those types of environments. Um, so yeah I I did work with people in Japan and when I was in the midsouth I mean I just love talking to hunters there because you know. When I talk to people who don't use dogs and dogs are largely banned now from from hunting all across the us in most states. Um and what they'll say to you is like it's not really a sport if you use a dog. It's too easy, but like that's the point right for hunter gatherers. That's the point. 04:42.59 David Yeah. 04:45.25 Angela Um, is that you it's not a sport for Hunter gatherer. It's not something that you want to be challenging. It's something that you want to be efficient, Um, and as an easy and quick as possible. So yeah dogs work. 04:58.10 archpodnet That that's awesome. Well it's I to to and I think we we talk about this and episode we recorded yesterday which is actually going to release after this but like the experiential knowledge you get from actually going out and doing stuff. Um. archeology- wise is really, you might not be able to quantify or qualitatively you mean you could write about it or whatnot. But it's hard to kind of put that into words or publish on it or something like that. But it's super important to actually get into those environments and try to replicate it as. As much as possible. You know. 05:35.97 Angela Yeah, yeah I mean that's one of the things that I aside from this kind of general idea of dog hunting One of the things I found really surprising was that you know, ah we think of Prey selection right? human Prey selection and the animals that we go after but when you use a dog. You don't really have any control.. There's no control in pre selection like the dog picks what it's going to go after and then that's what you go and kill and so when I think through you know, like funnel records of places where people are using dogs and I think like here's our prechoice selection. Oh here they went off for these animals or they went after this age or this group. And I'm just thinking like when you hunt with dogs. That's the way it works that dogs choose what you go after you're not Choosing. You're not like no no, not that one? Um, So yeah I mean you have to be there to really understand these types of like what seem like kind of my new decisions. Happen when you're hunting that actually turn into these really important kind of things when you go through the archaeological record. 06:39.90 David Um, so I guess 2 questions one in like oh how much like magnitude does hunting with a dog like optimize your like you know, return rate for these like cultures. 06:53.84 Angela Yeah, so my colleague Jeremy Coster he works in Nicaragua he does some really amazing work now with a mosquito and niana people in Nicaragua. Um, yep, she's excited about that. Mosquito magnum people in Nicaragua who use hunting dogs they're horticulturalists but most of their game comes from wild hunting and ah he does a lot of work looking at kind of optimal foraging theory and relating it to looking at. Ah, these dogs it has a lot to do with the environment that you're in the pre-species you're in and how much work you need to put into to cost benefit analyses right? How much work you need to put into getting good dogs. Um. So in places where he works right? People still use dogs and they're really important for hunting specific prey species some of them. They're horrible at hunting right? So a very limited prey spectrum that they're good at um. But he's an environment where dogs go very quickly. He'll tell you every time he comes back to his site most of the dogs he saw last time are gone because of disease because of jaguars and snakes and it's not a very friendly environment for dogs whereas you know other locations like these deciduous forest dogs. You know we have dogs and burials that are clearly like 1012 years old that are hunting dogs so you have dogs that are seemingly liver living much longer lives than they are in places like the neotropics. Um, so yeah, it depends on how much work you have to put it into it. Um, but if you. If you read the ethnographic literature most places where people use dogs and use them kind of religiously. They will say like we couldn't do what we do without the dogs like the dogs are our primary technology. Um and they are kind of. What everything in our economy centers around like we want. We really want this nice juicy pig species. But we don't even attempt to hunt that without dogs because the dogs go out and find it for us. They hold it down so we can kill it without dogs. It's really difficult. Um and hear that over and over for lots and lots of different species and. Yeah, it varies by environment. But that's kind of when people use dogs. They really maximize what they're getting out of the environment from them but Jeremy will tell you as well like you hope that your dog doesn't go after some creature that like it can never catch and then you just wasted like 3 hours 09:29.29 David Ah, ah because they just chase it. Yeah. 09:30.20 Angela And you're just like God Damn it this sucks. Yeah, so right? So it's a dogs are ideal in a location where basically every Prey species is a prey species that is good at being hunted with dogs. 09:45.55 David That's so cool. Um, yeah, please take me in your suitcase Next time you do something like that. Um, ah if there's Jaguars it'll be kind of fun. So um I guess the other question was like um. 09:49.24 Angela Yeah, we want to go to Nicaragua. 10:01.66 David You went to Japan to do some of this and you went to like the southeastern United States and like was the not to joke about it like the cultural experience like kind of equal in the sense of like how um like differing it was or was it like really fun doing both. 10:15.24 Angela Ah, Hunters are hunters all around the world and I have my experience so far has been that they are very similar kind of worldwide. Um, first of all, everyone is like what is this like girl doing following this around. Watching us hunt with dog. Why is she asking us weird questions like why is she asking us things that are seemingly obvious. Um, So yeah, they're always lots of fun. They're always, um, really happy to show you what they're doing and why they're doing it. Um, they're always. Largely maligned groups of people who are getting a lot of crap about a hunting and B hunting with dogs and so that's been an interesting world for me to slightly step into when you're person thing who studies hunting Dogs. You're a little bit. Like of a target for certain groups of people who are like hunting dogs are something you know. So yeah, it's an interesting world to like be part of and the us is really dwindling. There's so few states where you can hunt with dogs Now. Um. 11:12.83 David Yeah. 11:29.12 Angela And not that I necessarily like agree with hunting with dogs here, but it is It is kind of a traditional thing to do for a lot of the the people that I was working with. So yeah, it's It's interesting to see moving from the kind of prehistoric side of it to people who are still. Hunting the dogs. 11:49.42 archpodnet So This might be a dumb question. So but but hear me out. Um, how do you So You have the your ethnographic record your kind of um, your fieldwork working with these these groups. How do you.? How do you see and study dogs in the past and connect these modern kind of ethnographic accounts um to kind of prehistory. 12:15.78 Angela Yeah, it's difficult. Let me tell you that identifying hunting dogs and the archaeological record is not like it's not easy now. Sometimes I have work so I've done a paper recently maybe in the last two years on rock art. So hunting dogs in rock art in Saudi Arabia um which was awesome because it was a panel of people hunting with dogs of bows and arrows and leahes. So we were pretty clear that they were using dogs for hunting there right? So this is our dream. We would love to just have a bunch of rock art in Japan we have some. Some kind of artistic depictions as well of people hunting boar with hunting dogs. So okay, there. It's pretty clear right? But how you identify a hunting dog is is largely through context through um, ah pathology on dogs. Um. Through the things that they're buried with and the way in which they're buried like I said with my ph d we saw dog burials begin with this kind of transition and we saw them end with their arrival of agriculture which was at different times in all the 3 of these areas and then you suddenly you see dogs being treated. Like pariahs or Eton Or something else. So you no longer see these kind of elaborate burials and these burials are mirroring the burials of what you would think of as male hunter burials as well. So you see like a lot of evidence of dogs being treated in a very specific. Ah, very specific way. So there's lots of like other weird little things that you may find at sites such as um, intentional shelters or things being created for dogs. There's lots of really great ethnographic literature about how people treat their hunting dogs and. Creating sleeping platforms for them or building them special snow shelters if it's an arctic environments or sun shades if it's in quite warm environments with things like that. So these are some of the more detailed things that are harder to get at. But I think are really interesting. 14:23.00 David Yeah, that is the kind of stuff that like kind of keeps me up at night like how did they do it like what like I don't know there's just so many answers or questions you could ask about it. Um, and like Todd had asked me at 1 point like what's the number 1 thing you want to find and I was like okay like just a mammoth and like. 14:31.52 Angela Yeah. 14:42.19 David Ah, human and a dog preferably like the mammoth has to gourd both of them. So like you know they were hunting and it's just not going to be found but we would know a lot if we did um. 14:45.49 Angela Yes. I know this is yeah this rock art stuff was like you know I'd never even considered it and then a colleague of mine came to me and said we found something weird in Saudi Arabia do you want to take a look and I was just like oh do you know I do know what you found here. This is insane. This is amazing. It's literally groups of dogs on leashs dating to nine Thousand years ago with bows and arrows chasing down prey what you have this is like the gold mine. She was like oh it's a good house like it's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 15:22.78 archpodnet Looking yeah, it's the rosetta stone for Docs die. 15:24.46 David Say it's like a frigging time machine. That's really cool. 15:29.31 Angela It was so amazing exactly and like early evidence of leashs and like what the dogs looked like and they're like kind of phenotypic characteristics and the way that they're using them in different environments. It was just like yeah I mean that's the dream like it'll never come along again. But yeah. 15:46.23 David Yeah, um, those dogs had like curled like tails I remember seeing that in the ah like the panel which is like not wolfy. 15:49.50 Angela Enjoyed it. 15:54.28 Angela Yeah, yeah, it was really interesting because they looked so similar to something that is now the kind of israeli national dog the canaan dog which interestingly looks. Like all other kind of primitive dogs that we think of right? It's very Dingo looking or this mid-size yellow-ish dog that is what a pariah dog often is considered like pricked ears curled tail kind of a barreled chest medium-sized Tan. Um. And the depictions of dogs on these panels all looked exactly the same. They all looked very uniform. They even had so um, canaan dogs often have a white chest and have a little white tick on their shoulder and the dogs in these panels all had like white some kind of. Some kind of depiction of a chest like a chest piece of a different color or a different shade or something I mean it's rock art so you can't see but has a chest some kind of depiction in the chest and a lot of them have like something depicted on their shoulder that looks very similar to this like tick this white kind of line that we see on. I mean it was just crazy. So like I said but once in a lifetime like never again, will you see that. 17:08.49 David Yeah, that's crazy because I was just painting that the other day like trying to like make a replica of it and I was wondering what that little line I thought it was like separating their legs. But if that's like supposed to be coloring. That's really cool. Didn't even think of that. 17:21.80 Angela Yeah, yeah I think it's depicting um like a kind of a different color on the chest and a line or the tick we call it the tick. It's a genetic mutation. Um on their side. Yeah look up a canaan dog. You'll see all of them have this white. 17:36.34 David Huh. 17:39.79 Angela Little Mark right? there. 17:42.30 David I'm going to do that right now because we're going to end this session and in the next one we'll talk more about your research.