Martin H. Welker

About Martin H. Welker

I am an environmental archaeologist, specializing in zooarchaeology. I am currently the Associate Curator of Zooarchaeology at the Arizona State Museum, and also an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Anthropology. I am also a faculty affiliate in the Lovejoy Center for Biodiversity, Conservation Science, and Policy. I am actively pursuing research on the detection of archaeological dog remains in the archaeological record and the roles dogs played in prehistoric and historic communities in North America. I am also exploring the role of archaeological data within modern conservation and wildlife management research. I approach these research topics through a combination of zooarchaeology and morphometrics framed with ethnohistoric observations, quantitative modeling, and ecological theory. 

Selected Publications

Clay, Aidan, Aurelie Manin, Martin H. Welker, and Audrey T. Lin
2026. A Cultural and Evolutionary History of Dogs in the Americas. In History of Rabies in the Americas: From the Pre-Columbian to the Present, Volume IV, edited by Charles E. Rupprecht, pp. 49-80. Springer, Cham.

Welker, Martin H., Suzanne Needs-Howarth, and Eréndira M. Quintana Morales
2026. Swimming Upriver? Exploring the Sources of Freshwater and Marine Fish in Military Diet in Sixteenth to Nineteenth-Century Northeastern North America, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 36(4):984-1012.

Welker, M. H., J. R. Bratten, and E. Guiry
2025. Exploring the Arrival of Domestic Cats in the Americas. American Antiquity. 90(2):263-281.

Welker, M. H. and D. A. Byers
2025. Age, Sex, Captivity, and Tooth Crowding in North American Canids. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 63:105086.

Welker, M. H.
2025. Zooarchaeological Analysis: The Curious Case of Canid Identification in the New World. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 17(1).

Byers, D. A., M. H. Welker, A. Semanko, D. Itie, S. Noe, J. Vasquez, I. Holland-Lulewicz, and S. B. McClure
2024. Cranial Variability in North American Domestic and Wild Canids. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 57:104590

Guiry, E., R. Kennedy, […] M. H. Welker [21]
2024. The Ratting of North America: A 350-year Retrospective on Rattus Species Compositions and Competition. Science Advances 10(14):eadm6755.

Welker, M. H. and A. Semanko
2023. Revisiting Harold S. Colton’s 1970 Analysis of Dogs in the Southwest. Kiva 89(3):1-19.

Welker, M. H. and E. M. Quintana Morales
2022. Meta-Analysis of the North American Cod Fisheries: The Zooarchaeology of the 16th-19th Century Trans-Atlantic Cod Trade. Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 19(2):269-291.

Welker, M. H., J. E. Hughes, and S. B. McClure
2022. Cooperation and Cattle Herding in 18th Century Acadie: Implications for Prehistoric Agropastoralism. Journal of Ethnobiology 42(1):69-85.

Welker, M. H., E. K. Zavodny, S. B. McClure, E. Podrug, J. Jović, N. Triozzi*, and D. J. Kennett
2022. A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Development of Livestock Guarding Dogs on the Adriatic Coast of Croatia. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 42:103380.

Welker, M. H., D. A. Byers, and S. B. McClure
2021. “I Wanna Be Your Dog”: Evaluating the Efficacy of Univariate and Multivariate Methods for Differentiating Domestic and Wild Canids in North America. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 31(2):196-206.019. The Birch Creek Canids and Dogs as Transport Labor in the Intermountain West. American Antiquity 84(1):88-106. 

Courses Taught

ANTH 326: Domestication: The Evolutionary Entanglements of Humans, Plants, and Animals (Fall Semester, odd years)

ANTH 472/572: Zooarchaeology and Taphonomy: Applications in Archaeological Science (Fall Semester, even years)

Research Interests

Human-Environmental Interaction, Domestication, Colonization Events, Animal Translocation, Animal Management, Skeletal Morphometrics, Human Behavioral Ecology