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This chapter describes biology, including ornithology, through the hierarchies of Carl Von Linne (Linnaeus), and in relation to African vernacular traditions. Linnaeus' classificatory science moved across the globe in the nineteenth century with explorers and empires; by the late nineteenth century, ornithology had become a specialized scientific field. It spread across Africa in the wake of European political and economic expansion. With the help of vernacular birders, ornithologists harvested the avifauna of Africa, and with the help of laborers skilled at preparing specimens, they launched facts about bird species into the network of science. Ornithologists distinguished themselves from others through formal specialist knowledge that was not applied to the challenges of daily life. Their work privileged the visual, and for a long time the specimens of dead birds were more important objects of study than were living birds.

This chapter examines the avifaunal assemblage from archaeological excavations at Nuʻalolo Kai. The use of evolutionary ecological models to archaeological data (that is, animal bone) is a well-established method for understanding change over time, human interaction with the environment, and the process of resource depression and intensification in prehistory. While a variety of studies utilizing evolutionary ecology have focused on Pacific ichthyofauna, very few have focused on avifauna. This chapter first provides a description of the avifaunal assemblage from Nuʻalolo Kai before analyzing the bird species identified from the assemblage, including brown noddy, black-crowned night heron, and wedge-tailed shearwater. It also considers both human and nonhuman modification of bird bone, various hunting methods that were recorded ethnographically for catching seabirds, temporal changes in resource utilization of seabirds and in seabird exploitation, and temporal change in bird bone tools. The chapter concludes with a discussion of modified vs. unmodified bird bone.

As we have seen in Chapter 4, many invalid European Pleistocene amphibian and reptile species were named on the basis of insufficient and inadequately described fossils (e.g., Estes, 1981, 1983; Rage, 1984c; Sanchiz, in press). Some of these forms have been synonymized with modern species, but others are in taxonomic limbo because of the international rules of zoological nomenclature. We now turn to a consideration of the few European Pleistocene fossil herpetological species that have been recognized as valid in recent years. These taxa fit into three catagories: (1) an extinct Pliocene anuran taxon that extended into the Pleistocene, (2) large Lacerta species that lived on oceanic islands, and (3) Pleistocene species that are probably morphological variants of living forms. All of the following taxa are addressed in Chapter 4. No extinct species of Pleistocene salamanders are currently recognized in Britain or Europe. The genus * Pliobatrachus from the Pliocene of eastern Europe extended into the Lower Pleistocene of Poland and the Middle Pleistocene of Germany in the form of * Pliobatrachus cf. Pliobatrachus langhae. The *Palaeobatrachidae, the only family in the history of the Anura that became totally extinct (Roček, 1995), represents the only extinct herpetological family known in the Pleistocene of Britain and Europe, and *Pliobalrachus represents the only extinct herpetologcal genus known in the Pleistocene of the region. Rocck (1995) suggested that the *Palaeobatrachidae did not survive the Pleistocene cooling because of their prevailingly aquatic mode of life, unlike, for instance, the Ranidac and Bufonidae that were able to withdraw from iceobliterated areas and return when climatic conditions improved. *Lacerta goliath is a Pleistocene or Holocene species that is known only from two localities in the Canary islands (see Chapters 4 and 5). It is twice the size of Lacerta lepida, the largest modern European Lacerta. *Lacerta maxima is another very large Pleistocene or Holocene Lacerta that is endemic to the Canary Islands. This species is known from a single fossil locality (see Chapters 4 and 5) and is differentiated from * Lacerta goliath on the basis of several trenchant osteological characters.