William R. Adams Zooarchaeology Laboratory

The William R. Adams Zooarchaeology Laboratory (WRAZL) at Indiana University is a research laboratory affiliated with the Anthropology Department on the Bloomington campus. Located in the lower level of the Student Building, the zooarchaeology lab is a 1,400 square foot facility that includes over 10,000 modern comparative faunal remains and also houses archaeological research projects from the North American Plains.

At its core, WRAZL is a biological reference collection. Museum collections like these are built and maintained to aid researchers, teachers, and students in understanding the variety present in the the natural world. To do that, we process, manage, and care for the skeletons of a wide variety of species, with representatives of a broad range of ages, sexes, geographic origins, and other sources of individual variation, as well as pathological specimens. Fortunately, at this time we seldom find it necessary to collect specimens from the wild, as we are able to acquire a large number from cooperating departments, other universities, government entities, hunters and fishermen, zoos, and roadkill.

Currently, the collection contains approximately over 10,000 catalogue numbers, including 2,993 non-primate mammals, 3,634 birds, 1,936 fish, 1,390 reptiles, 229 amphibians, and an uncounted number of invertebrates. The Department of Anthropology’s primate skeletons are housed in the Human Origins and Primate Evolution Laboratory.