Do faunal remains reflect socioeconomic status? An ethnoarchaeological study among Central African farmers in the northern Congo Basin

Zooarchaeological analyses often draw inferences on socioeconomic status from the composition of bone assemblages associated with houses and other structures in residential sites. In this paper, we test how well faunal assemblages reflect socioeconomic differences among contemporary farmer households in two rural villages in the Central African Republic. Independent measures of wealth are tallied and ranked for six households in each village, including complete inventories of the types and numbers of material goods and the sizes of residential structures and agricultural fields. These data are compared against the associated food bones collected from household trash middens and activity areas, including skeletal abundances, large mammal body part representation, and taxonomic diversity. In most instances larger and more taxonomically diverse faunal assemblages are associated with houses of means and the faunas do, in fact, reflect differences in socioeconomic status. However, faunal “wealth” may be linked to factors unrelated to social or economic inequalities, notably the presence of active hunters. Our analyses suggest that small animals provide useful and important data in assessing socioeconomic means, and comparative studies of wealth in archaeological contexts should not be based on bones alone.