A comment about the surviving chance od bones:
Umberto has written:
>Dear Jacqui,
>I think that zooarchaeologists have assumed for a long time that in
>most cases what they study is a small percentage of what was
>originally deposited - this is due to scavenger activities as well as
>to lots of other factors. However, I believe that there is huge
>variability and it is probably not a good idea to try to estimate a
>survival percentage to be applied to all sites.
>If what we find represented just the leftovers of scavengers'
>activities I would expect to find on all sites very high frequencies of
>gnawing. Although this is sometimes the case, in many other sites
>the frequency of gnawing is in fact quite low. I think that this is
>because we may underestimate the amount of material that was
>subject to prompt burial. This is easily spotted when found in
>primary deposit, but in many other cases such material will have
>been reworked at a later stage when the bones are already dry and
>not anymore palatable for dogs. I think that this is the main -
>though no the only - reason why we find material in secondary
>deposition that has little gnawing, and whose formation, I think, has
>been little affected by scavengers' activity.
>This is not to deny that scavengers have a very important role in
>the formation of bone assemblages, but just to remind that there
>are other equally important factors.
>Cheers,
>Umberto
due to the excellent preservation in swiss neolithic lake shore sites it is
possible to estimate a percentage of survived bones. If we compare the meat
wight calculated by the minimum number of individuals and an average wight
of a species (e.g. cattle) with the meat wight calculated by the bone wight
of the species (skeleton wight 7-10% of the body wight), we got normaly the
result that in maximum 1% of all the bones have survived (by very good
concervation conditions!). This tells us not how much of the bones are
destroyed by carnivores or pigs but how much of the bone material was
destroyed by all possible reasons! In mineral soil preservation the
percentage must be clearly less than 1%.
Cheers,
Joerg
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Prof. Dr. Jörg Schibler
Seminar für Ur- und Frühgeschichte
Archaeobiological Department
University of Basel
Petersgraben 9-11
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland
Tel +41 61 267 23 53
Fax +41 61 267 23 52
homepage: www.unibas.ch/arch/
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