A Peek Inside … Zooarchaeologist Barnet Pavão-Zuckerman’s Office

A scavenged deer bone from the parking lot of Barnet Pavão-Zuckerman’s undergraduate apartment complex gave her to the courage to speak to a professor about changing her major. 

“I needed an excuse to go see him,” said Pavão-Zuckerman, who was curious about anthropology but didn’t want to study human remains. “I walked into his zooarchaeology lab, and it was full of skulls and animal bones. It wasn’t quite like the heavens opened, but it was definitely a moment where I was like, ‘Wow, this is a thing I could study!’” 

Today, she’s the chair of the University of Maryland’s Department of Anthropology, researching how animal remains can offer insights into human history. That includes the wide-ranging impact of the cattle economy in colonial Charleston, South Carolina; fish, rabbits and raccoons as supplemental foods in enslaved communities such as James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia; and the introduction of livestock to Native American communities in Arizona. 

While she displays a few real animal skulls and some replica fossils in her office, the real trove is two floors below. In the Woods Hall basement, drawers upon drawers of every type of animal bone, from bird to lizard to mammal, are carefully catalogued for students to study. Some are purchased, while others, like a fox that Pavão-Zuckerman found mostly decomposed in the woods on a hike, were scooped into a bucket, brought in, and treated with a special detergent to clean them for use in class. 

She explains why she has a dire wolf skull, how her family got her into archaeology and the origins of the World War II victory flag hanging from her filing cabinet. 

The painting by Pavão-Zuckerman’s father, Michael Pavão, depicts himself and her younger sister, Felicia. He worked mostly in abstract art, welding and sculpting. But the image isn’t the original, she said. “He was smoking a cigar, and everybody hated it: ‘You’re holding a baby and smoking!” That piece is in her departmental chair’s office, while this sanitized version hangs behind her desk upstairs. 

Perched in a corner is the plaster cast of a skull from a dire wolf, a real animal that was widespread across North America and went extinct about 10,000 years ago (vs. the fictional direwolf of “Game of Thrones”). It was owned by Stan Olsen, a founder of the field of zooarchaeology who predated Pavão-Zuckerman as curator at the Arizona State Museum. “He was a wonderful artist and illustrator,” she said. 

She also keeps a small collection of real skulls on a bookshelf, including ones from a raccoon and fox. They’re found alongside a deer tibia carved into a laser pointer gifted by a fellow grad student at the University of Georgia as a graduation present, alongside with a fossilized mammoth toe, at least 12,000 years old. 

Raised in a small town in upstate New York, Pavão-Zuckerman always loved anatomy and evolution, tracing all the bones of a cat paw from the encyclopedia as a child. She was first exposed to archaeology when she visited her uncle (pictured at center in the photo above) at a dig in Ohio at age 6. She recalls passing dirt through a filter, collecting artifacts and picking an item—which turned out to be a fish vertebra—to show him. “I go, ‘Uncle Alan, what’s that?’ And he says, ‘That’s the remains of someone’s dinner from a long time ago,’” she said. 

Pavão-Zuckerman’s maternal grandfather was born in Italy in 1912, immigrating to the United States with his mother when he was 8 years old. He later fought for the Americans in World War II in North Africa and China. “They fled Italy because of fascism, then later fought against his birth country,” she said. Her great-grandmother bought the victory flag for her son to celebrate the end of the war, and when she returned to the old family home in Northern Italy in the 1950s, she brought it back with her. When Pavão-Zuckerman’s family visited last summer, they brought the flag back as a way to remember him. On the right, the bottle-turned-lamp is another Italian memento; the wine was made by a cousin.