Since we have moved away from Britain perhaps I can also mention that
when I studied the animal bones from the Iron Age site of Otranto in
south-eastern Italy in 1991, I found, mixed with the archaeological
bones, four shark teeth probably from the Miocene period. Although it is not
impossible that they had ended up accidentally in the archaeological
assemblage (the area is rich in this type of fossils) I argued, on the
basis of the fact that the teeth were not embedded in the rock but
quite neatly cleaned, that it was more likely that they had been
extracted and used by the Iron Age people, perhaps as a curio or for
whatever other use.
The finds are mentioned in the following publication (alas, in
Italian)
Albarella, U. 1997. La fauna dell'abitato dell'eta' del ferro di
Otranto. In F. D'Andria (ed.). Metodologie di catalogazione dei beni
archeologici. Lecce, Bari: Martano, Edipuglia, pp.189-209.
I have lifted the above information from a discussion on the archaeological re-
use of fossil material that we had last year on Zooarch. If you are interested
to see the whole correspondence, go to
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/zooarch.html
choose 'search the archives' and then make a search for the word 'fossil' in
the subject heading
Cheers,
Umberto
--
Umberto Albarella
Dept of Archaeology
University of Durham
Durham DH1 3LE, UK
tel.+44-191-3341153
fax +44-191-3341101
http://www.dur.ac.uk/Archaeology/staff/UA/index.htm
"The worst betrayal of intelligence is finding
justification for the world as it is"
Jean Guehenno
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