Florencia,
I think the true answer to your enquiry lies in thinking about what you are
trying to find out. For general conclusions about the changes in say economic
strategies over time, the large sample sizes provided by grouping together
individual contexts into chronological units are useful i.e. enough data to say
something.
However if you want to get into the minutiate of your site it is possible to
analyse each context to find out what bits of which animals are deposited on
different house floors or indeed in different layers in pits. For this you can
find out how much of each species is present using the MNE and MNI (after Brain
for example). You also need to think about what exactly does each context
represent, for example how long did it take to form and where did the material
come from?
This sort of analysis can become very time consuming and involve rather small
sample sizes. We are doing this type of analysis for the floors we find with a
series of Bronze Age and Norse households, and for example we can find a
particular floor type assemblage, lots of fragments and the only identificable
bits smaller dense bones such as phalanges. Middens on the other hand contain,
as you would imagine, a much wider range of elements representing food and
slaughter waste.
At context level I would be reluctant to try exprapolate the changes in
relative MNIs between floors to changes in herding strategies - rather would see
it as differences in processing and deposition. The comparision between say
floors and middens in general can also be interesting.
One could argue that, in a site consisting only of house floors, our data
indicates that floors would not acurrately reflect overall economies, so why try
to use this data to find out about them?
Well we have to a. work with the data we have and b. recognise the limitations
of our data.
Regarding differences in taphonomy - I have neatly avoiding this by working in
somewhat monotonous sites recently i.e. all one substrate. Again you can become
involved in grouping pits/ditches/layer etc - but of course within each of these
categories of deposition there can be a range of conditions - are all pits equal
in pH, erosion or fragmentation? So at this point you can ask your
archaeologist for pertainent information and/or try quizzing your data to look
for differences in preservation etc. In reality you need do think about both.
Finally all of this is of course limited by time, which of course means money.
Usefully you could examine some of the more recently published bone reports to
see the approaches people take to urban data - e.g. York, Lincoln, London etc.
Anyhow I hope my monday morning work avoidance helps. And feel free to ask any
more questions. It a while since we had a quantification discussion.
Jacqui
Jacqui Mulville,
Honorary Meeting Secretary,
Prehistoric Society.
Lecturer in Bioarchaeoloy,
School of History and Archaeology
Cardiff University
Cardiff
CF10 3XU
Tel: + 44 (0) 29 2087 4247
Fax: + 44 (0) 29 2087 4929
|