Dear Edward,
This is indeed a serious problem on many sites. As far as absolute 
ageing of animals in concerned there is little you can do - isolated 
teeth are bound to give you much more approximate information 
than tooth rows.
You can however work on a relative basis and build up distributions 
of wear stages of individual teeth to be compared with similar 
distributions from other phases or other sites.  This can still be 
quite informative. 
I think that the analysis of isolated teeth should be carried out even 
when many tooth rows are available. It is very useful to look at the 
ageing evidence in a number of different ways. Tooth rows can be 
affected by taphonomic biases that don't affect loose teeth (and 
vice versa) and therefore the use of both approaches can clarify 
aspects of the tahomomic history of an assemblage that have led 
to the creation of a particular age distribution. I have worked on a 
number of bone assemblages in which the evidence from loose 
teeth has saved me from interpreting the kill-off pattern calculated 
from tooth rows incorrectely  
Cheers,
Umberto




Date sent:      	Wed, 11 Oct 2000 15:48:29 GMT
Subject:        	Re: infant mortality
From:           	"Ed Maher" <[log in to unmask]>
To:             	[log in to unmask]
Send reply to:  	"Ed Maher" <[log in to unmask]>
 
>   I would like to interject just one small detail. With regards to how one
> should date the age at death of an animal, the concensus seems so side
> with dental attriction over epiphyseal fusion. But I am assuming that the
> teeth that are actually scored are still set within the animal's mandible,
> so one can get a tighter sequence of dental scores when looking at a row
> of teeth (for example:M1, M2, M3). But what seems to be the standard
> practise when there are VERY few teeth still within the mandible? The site
> I am working on now has a lot of teeth, and a lot of mandibles, but just
> very few mandibles with teeth! I would suspect that scoring isolated teeth
> would result in a much wider suggested age at death (for example 2-6 years
> of age) as opposed to a series of teeth still situated in the animal's
> jaw.
>   How would all of you deal with this situation?
> 
>   Edward F. Maher
>   PhD Candidate
>   University of Illinois at Chicago
>   2000-2001 George A. Barton Fellow
>   (Albright Institute, Jerusalem, Israel)






Umberto Albarella
Department of Ancient History and Archaeology
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2TT
U.K.
tel. +44/121/4147386
fax. +44/121/4145516
email [log in to unmask]
http://www.bham.ac.uk/BZL


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