That's an interesting approach, and an ingenious use of the exceptional
preservation. My concern is that by using MNI estimates as the basis of
the meat weight calculation, the resulting figures will lie at one
extreme of a range of possibilities, with no means of estimating the
other extreme of that range. But my scepticism with regard to MNI is a
matter of record!
Terry O'Connor
schibler wrote:
>
> 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
> ________________________________________________
> Please note the new email adress starting at october 1, 1999:
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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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