About

Dr. William T. Taylor is an archaeologist, scientist, and author whose work focuses on the domestication of the horse and the ancient relationships between people and animals. His research spans multiple regions known as “horse country,” including the steppes of Eurasia, the Great Plains of North America, and the Pampas of Argentina. Taylor integrates emerging technologies and cutting-edge scientific techniques with historic records, traditional knowledge, and personal experience to tell the story of the bond between humans and horses. His work offers a revolutionary new account of how horses altered the course of human history, tracing their origins and spread from the western Eurasian steppes to the invention of horse-drawn transportation and the shift to mounted riding. Through his archaeological journey, Taylor explores how momentous events in the human-horse story helped create the world we live in today.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Pure mathematics

Selected publications

• Contextos arqueológicos del proceso de contacto en la cuenca media del río Gallegos (norte del Campo Volcánico Pali Aike, Santa Cruz, Argentina)

  Magallania · 2026-04-26

  articleOpen access

  Se presentan 12 contextos arqueológicos en superficie y al aire libre y se analiza su correspondencia con el proceso de contacto entre poblaciones Aonikenk y europeas-criollas en el sector del norte del Campo Volcánico Pali-Aike (CVPA), ubicado en la cuenca media del río Gallegos. El área de estudio comprende el cañadón Mack Aike y las planicies aterrazadas que lo enmarcan. Las principales líneas de evidencia se relacionan con la presencia de artefactos de vidrio y metal, fauna introducida y la cronología radiocarbónica. Se plantea un esquema de tres momentos para describir el proceso de contacto y enmarcar su discusión. Los contextos arqueológicos incluyen campamentos, sectores de actividades específicas y eventos aislados de pérdida o descarte de un único artefacto que ofrecen evidencia importante para evaluar contactos tempranos. La información provista suma un nuevo espacio en Pali Aike a la comprensión del proceso del contacto y valoriza la contribución que la arqueología puede realizar del uso de espacios alejados de la costa marina.

  PublisherDOI

• Global natural history infrastructure requires international solidarity, support, and investment in local capacity

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-01-30 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Amid global challenges like climate change, extinctions, and disease epidemics, science and society require nuanced, international solutions that are grounded in robust, interdisciplinary perspectives and datasets that span deep time. Natural history collections, from modern biological specimens to the archaeological and fossil records, are crucial tools for understanding cultural and biological processes that shape our modern world. At the same time, natural history collections in low and middle-income countries are at-risk and underresourced, imperiling efforts to build the infrastructure and scientific capacity necessary to tackle critical challenges. The case of Mongolia exemplifies the unique challenges of preserving natural history collections in a country with limited financial resources under the thumb of scientific colonialism. Specifically, the lack of biorepository infrastructure throughout Mongolia stymies efforts to study or respond to large-scale environmental changes of the modern era. Investment in museum capacity and training to develop locally-accessible collections that characterize natural communities over time and space must be a key priority for a future where understanding climate scenarios, predicting, and responding to zoonotic disease, making informed conservation choices, or adapting to agricultural challenges, will be all but impossible without relevant and accessible collections.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding the origin of reindeer riding in Northeast Asia through animal paleopathology and collaborative archaeology

  Arctic Antarctic and Alpine Research · 2025-06-06

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The innovation of reindeer transport has transformed human societies across Northeast Asia. Tracing the prehistory of reindeer domestication and riding, however, has proven challenging. Recent cross-species archaeozoological research has developed an expanded paleopathological toolkit, but to date, there are few approaches to better understand the role of mounted reindeer riding, a key aspect of ancient Northeast Asian lifeways. Here, we present new osteological insights from contemporary domestic reindeer in northern Mongolia, where mounted riding remains an important mode of transport in the traditional pastoral lifeways of the Tsaatan community. Our study of modern skeletal material suggests that reindeer riding produces recognizable alterations to the skeleton, including left-biased asymmetry, pathological deformation to the vertebrae, and exostoses of the lower limbs. Comparison of reindeer tack and skeletal pathology with those from domestic horses shows unique features linked to the specific modality and equipment used in reindeer riding that may help trace the origins of this important innovation in archeological contexts across prehistory.

  PublisherDOI

• Validating a Target‐Enrichment Design for Capturing Uniparental Haplotypes in Ancient Domesticated Animals

  Molecular Ecology Resources · 2025-04-09 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  In the last three decades, DNA sequencing of ancient animal osteological assemblages has become an important tool complementing standard archaeozoological approaches to reconstruct the history of animal domestication. However, osteological assemblages of key archaeological contexts are not always available or do not necessarily preserve enough ancient DNA for a cost-effective genetic analysis. Here, we develop an in-solution target-enrichment approach, based on 80-mer species-specific RNA probes (ranging from 306 to 1686 per species) to characterise (in single experiments) the mitochondrial genetic variation from eight domesticated animal species of major economic interest: cattle, chickens, dogs, donkeys, goats, horses, pigs and sheep. We also illustrate how our design can be adapted to enrich DNA library content and map the Y-chromosomal diversity within Equus caballus. By applying our target-enrichment assay to an extensive panel of ancient osteological remains, farm soil, and cave sediments spanning the last 43 kyrs, we demonstrate that minimal sequencing efforts are necessary to exhaust the DNA library complexity and to characterise mitogenomes to an average depth-of-coverage of 19.4 to 2003.7-fold. Our assay further retrieved horse mitogenome and Y-chromosome data from Late Pleistocene coprolites, as well as bona fide mitochondrial sequences from species that were not part of the probe design, such as bison and cave hyena. Our methodology will prove especially useful to minimise costs related to the genetic analyses of maternal and paternal lineages of a wide range of domesticated and wild animal species, and for mapping their diversity changes over space and time, including from environmental samples.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Multi-species entanglements and stable isotope signals ( <i>δ</i> ¹³ C and <i>δ</i> ¹⁵ N) in modern reindeer herding communities of boreal northeast Asia

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2025-05-15 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Prevailing anthropocentric frameworks of animal husbandry in archaeological research are increasingly critiqued for their inability to capture the full spectrum of human-non-human systems. In west Siberia and northern Mongolia, reindeer herding communities practise an entwined multi-species lifeways with the subarctic boreal and forest ecosystems-but these practices lack secure archaeological chronologies and time depth in northeast Asia. Traces of reindeer herding and reindeer remains themselves are often under-represented in the depositional record, requiring alternative avenues for tracing the archaeology of reindeer herding. Here, we explore the potential of documenting these complex dynamics archaeologically through a proof-of-concept analysis of stable isotopic carbon and nitrogen in faunal bone collagen, which can represent a possible nexus of multi-species practices. In doing so, we seek to expand investigative potentials into both human and non-human community members, providing valuable, nuanced insights into past practices, hunter-herder interactions and domestication dynamics.This article is part of the theme issue 'Unravelling domestication: multi-disciplinary perspectives on human and non-human relationships in the past, present and future'.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding horse domestication and horse health care in the ancient world

  Journal of Equine Veterinary Science · 2025-05-01

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Many of the most important equine health problems - and their solutions - relate to the role of horses as a domestic animal, especially in riding and other kinds of transport. Recently, new discoveries from the archaeological sciences have rewritten our understanding of early horse domestication, suggesting that the first ancestors of domestic horses emerged in the Black Sea Steppes of western Eurasia at the turn of the second millennium BCE. This new chronology places horse domestication within a wider trajectory of early animal transport, including cattle and donkey, across western Asia and northern Africa beginning in the fourth millennium BCE. Archaeological data suggest that some health problems including musculoskeletal issues linked with transport, dental challenges, and disease emerged alongside horse transport, and that some of these issues solicited early veterinary care. Collaboration between archaeozoology and equine science has the potential to reveal much more about early human-horse dynamics, but doing so requires overcoming important obstacles, including contrasting methodology and incentives for those working in each discipline.

  PublisherDOI

• Early transatlantic movement of horses and donkeys at Jamestown

  Science Advances · 2025-09-03

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Domestic equids were central to the initial colonization of the Atlantic coast of the Americas, a process partially chronicled by historical records. While Spanish colonists brought horses to the Caribbean decades earlier, settlement of the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, was among the first dispersals of horses to the eastern seaboard. Archaeozoological analysis of identifiable domestic equid remains from two contexts associated with the initial occupation of Jamestown demonstrates intense processing and consumption of the first Jamestown horses during the "Starving Time" winter of 1609. Osteological and biomolecular study of these equid remains demonstrates their successful reproduction at the colony and use in transport activities and identifies an adult domestic donkey with mixed European and West African ancestry, possibly supplied through undocumented exchange during a transatlantic stopover. These results reveal the challenges of equid translocation in early settlement of eastern North America and the global connectivity of early transatlantic animal exchange.

  PublisherDOI

• High altitude horse use and early horse transport in eastern Eurasia: New evidence from melting ice

  The Holocene · 2024-06-10 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  While few places on earth have been as deeply impacted by the human-horse relationship as the steppes of Mongolia and eastern Eurasia, gaps in the archaeological record have made it strikingly difficult to trace when and how the first domestic horses were integrated into ancient societies in this key region of the world. Recently, organic materials preserved in melting mountain ice have emerged as a key source of archaeological insight into the region’s deep past. Newly-identified artefacts recovered from melting snow and ice in the Altai Mountain range of western Mongolia (including metal artefacts, skeletal remains, and hoof fragments) provide archaeological evidence for the use of horses at high altitudes from the Bronze Age through the 20th century. Direct radiocarbon dating and genomic sequencing demonstrate the presence of Przewalski’s horse in the region during the early second millennium BCE, suggesting that this taxon may have once foraged at high altitudes frequented by human hunters. Importantly, directly-dated remains of horse hoof trimmings provide some of the oldest direct evidence of horse transport in the Eastern Steppe as early as the 14th century BCE, and suggest a role for high-mountain hunting in the innovation of reliable mounted riding.

  PublisherDOI

• Editorial

  Journal of Glacial Archaeology · 2024-03-29

  editorialOpen access

  15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BXMost glacial archaeology is funded by the public.Some funds are provided by local, regional, and national governmental agencies in recognition

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toward Legal, Ethical, and Culturally Informed Care of Animal Remains in American Museum Collections

  Advances in Archaeological Practice · 2024-11-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Repatriation of human remains and associated funerary objects under NAGPRA and the increased use of culturally informed curation practices for sacred, religious, and ceremonial objects are important steps toward restoring control over cultural patrimony to Native Nations in the United States. Many museums holding Indigenous belongings have begun a collaborative care approach involving Indigenous community voices and improving access to collections. However, this framework has not been applied to many animal remains curated in American archaeology museums, which remain broadly beyond the care or administrative purview of Native people. Because many Indigenous worldviews do not hold a clear separation between the human and animal spheres, common practices applied to animal remains are not congruent with the idea of respectful or culturally informed care. Here we outline steps to shift the treatment of animals through the application of Indigenous knowledge to museum collections.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sydney Bulman‐Fleming

  Wilfrid Laurier University

  18 shared

• Ralph Freese

  University of Hawaii System

  17 shared

• William A. Lampe

  University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

  17 shared

• Ralph McKenzie

  University of Novi Sad

  12 shared

• George F. McNulty

  University of South Carolina

  11 shared

• Alan Day

  Lakehead University

  9 shared

• E.R. Hayes

  1 shared

• Jan Mycielskl

  University of Colorado Boulder

  1 shared

Labs

• Making Museum Collections Accessible to College StudentsPI