After performing a series of increasingly annoying favors for me, my dear friend (and fellow UC Berkeley graduate student) asked for a favor in return–she wanted me to post about hamsters on my blog. Fair enough, but…I didn’t really know much about hamsters. I asked my favorite faunal analyst about hamsters in archaeology, their use as food, and their eventual domestication. No dice. So I went to the web.
Hamsters were very recently domesticated, in 1930, as research subjects in laboratories. (Apparently the ancestor of all these domesticated hamsters was captured in Aleppo, Syria and taken to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.) Indeed, most references that I could find were medical experiments (viagra cures jet lag in hamsters) or pet guides. Sadly, they’re not known as food species, like their fellow domesticates the Guinea pig, which played an important role in Andean cuisine. Apparently an enterprising vertebrate paleontologist, Björn Kurtén measured stoat and hamsters teeth found in Pleistocene sites in Hungary to measure climate change in the past. The reference is mostly notable for having the term “stoat oscillation” in it, which is purely unintentional, yet delightfully vivid imagery. (Incidentally, Kurtén also coined the term “paleofiction,” a genre that Jean Auel made famous. Also, it sounds like his Dance of the Tiger might be a good book for a prehistory in fiction class. hmmm.)
Not having access to the Berkeley library limits me in my research as well. I have pdfs of most of the books related to my research on my computer, but Approaches to faunal analysis in the Middle East is not one of them, sadly.
So, that’s about all I have to offer–a rambling trawl through library searches, online journals, and wikipedia. Now, at least, I know what the dorsal view of the hamster tongue looks like.
Colleen Morgan 
I actually read Dance of the Tiger in my freshman Human Evolution class, although I’m not sure I can say with 100% confidence that it was either actually helpful in terms of the material, or that great a read.
Fair enough–I haven’t read it.
Hamsters, like marmots, are largely under-researched rodents in archaeology. There’s a lot about mice, and quite a bit about guinea pigs.
Illuminating nonetheless.