Skeletal Remains of Dog from the Asahi-nishi-site, Aichi, 1984

Abstract

In 1984, at least eighteen domestic dogs were excavated together with archeological remains and human bones from Asahi-nishi-site, Aichi, whose age is thought to be about A.D. 1600.
The Japanese domestic dogs have changed since Jomon period involving foreign lineages from continents of many times. It is evident that dogs were brought from Europe at the Japanese turbulent age. There must be some genetic differences among dogs even from one site and the individual informations are necessary to analyze the history of the Japanese domestic dogs. Here the characters of the dog remains from the Asahi-nishi-site are reported with the metrical values on skull, mandible, tooth and hip bone.
These remains were found from the old moat of Kiyosu Castle with very weak waterflow. Fifteen skulls, fifteen mandibles and thirteen hip bones were excavated with many ribs and vertebrae, while extremities are only five and the scapula is none. Twelve pairs of skull and mandible were matched, and so there exist at least eighteen individuals, though the correspondence of skull to the hip bone is not clear. Of these, thirteen animals are with full erupted permanent teeth and the rest five have still deciduous teeth. From the subpubic angle, six females, five males were identified (Table 3). Since this site is not of village, these constitutions of age and sex do not represent that of a certain community.
As shown in Table 1, 2 and 3, there is individual difference to some extent on each dimension and index. Some skulls and teeth indicate greater values than those of the previous and same age reported by Shigehara and Onodera (1984) or Shigehara (1985), which suggests some factor toward a large size at this period. The frontal "stop" is generally small, which is an old character of Japanese dogs.