Ye Pleasant Mount: 1989 1990 Excavations - Open site which ...

These data allow us to draw some conclusions about food procurement, diet, food
preparation and cuts of meat consumed, and patterns of butchering in this
eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth century system.
DietaryElementsatMt. Pleasant
The Mt. Pleasant faunal assemblage seems to follow a pattern of increased
reliance on domestic animals and birds, and a corresponding decrease in
exploitation of deer through time. Bone and meat frequencies indicate that three
species, deer, cattle, and pigs, respectively, dominated the diet during the earliest
period of occupation. During the later period ofoccupation, cattle, pigs, and small
wild mammals appear to have been more heavily utilized than deer. This may
have been related to depopulation of deer through hunting during the period of
occupation. Pigs provided a consistent, but low, percentage of biomass in both the
upper and lower levels.
It does appear that the adaptive strategy at Mt. Pleasant became more focal
through time. A focal adaptation is based upon the intensive exploitation of a few
species throughout the year, rather than the seasonal, scheduled exploitation of
many different animals, and this may fit the pattern reflected in the Mt. Pleasant
faunal collection. During the later historic occupation, the Mt. Pleasant fauna
suggest a consistent focus on domestic mammals and birds, supplemented by
small, but consistent amounts of small wild animals, wild birds, fish, and
molluscs. The domestic animals, cattle, pigs, and chickens, are typical of both
historic Indian and historic European sites that have had zooarchaeological
analysis.
The Mt. Pleasant sample is very small and therefore difficult to compare with
analyses of contemporary sites in the region. The faunal sample from the Rae's
Creek site dated between ca. 1650 and 1750. Preservation was poor, but the
identified sample was larger than that at Mt. Pleasant. Species diversity was
lower at Rae's Creek (Wood 1989) than at Mt. Pleasant during the earliest
occupation (Wood 1990). However, this is not reflected in the current Mt. Pleasant
sample, probably due to the small number of remains analyzed. At Rae's Creek,
wild animals predominated. In the current Mt. Pleasant sample, deer and fish
in the lower levels contributed 50 percent of the MNI and 33.6 percent of the
biomass. The majority ofbiomass (52.9%) in Levels 3, 4, and 5 was contributed by
unidentified medium-large mammal fragments, which could represent cattle,
pigs, or deer. Wild animals represented only 2.9 percent of the biomass, while
domestic animals contributed 47.8 percent of the biomass from Levels 1 and 2.
Unidentified medium-large mammals represented the second highest percentage
of biomass (44.2%).
A much larger, though contemporary, faunal sample from the Thomas Hird Lot
at the Fort Frederica site has been analyzed (Honerkamp 1975, 1980). Domestic
animals dominated this assemblage, and represented 20 percent of the MNI and
78 percent of the biomass. Wild terrestrial animals and estuarine species
contributed 31 percent of the MNI and 21 percent of the biomass for the total
species assemblage at this site.
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