Integrating Morphological and ZooMS-Based Approaches to Zooarchaeology at Vogelherd Cave in Southwestern Germany

Zooarchaeology is an established subfield of archaeology that incorporates a variety of interdisciplinary tools. Advances in analytical methods like radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and ancient DNA analysis have added new dimensions to zooarchaeological research in the past century. In recent years, the addition of the ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) offers exciting new possibilities for studying faunal remains in archaeological contexts.
In this study, we use the Vogelherd Cave, a Palaeolithic site in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany, as a case study to showcase the advances in zooarchaeological analysis and changes in research focus. Gustav Riek from the University of Tübingen completely excavated the site’s rich deposits in 1931. In 2005-2012 and 2022-2023, Nicholas J. Conard’s team from the University of Tübingen excavated Riek’s backdirt using modern excavation techniques.
While Ulrich Lehmann published the first systematic analysis of the faunal assemblage from a paleontological perspective in 1954, it was not until the early 2000s that Laura Niven undertook a comprehensive zooarchaeological study. In 2014, Boger and colleagues analysed the fauna remains from the backdirt to gain a more complete view of the faunal assemblage. The current study adds the first ZooMS analysis of 287 fragmentary bones from the same site. Our focus lies on highly fragmented faunal remains obtained from water-screened sediment of the backdirt.
Here, we compile and compare our ZooMS results to previous faunal datasets from Vogelherd. The history of research at this site provides a representative example of how the research has expanded over time and how novel analytical methods contribute to the interpretation of a site. By juxtaposing traditional zooarchaeological data and ZooMS data, we explore the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and contemplate how to integrate these methods in future research.