Dear Barnet,
While prepping pig skeletons I have seen a very similar bone from a pigs
nose. Apparently, some ossification occurs within the cartilege. Since
you do not mention finding pig bones in this assemblage, perhaps the
same sort of thing occurs in the nose of cattle. Do you have cattle
skull bones?
Tonya Largy, M.A.
Zooarchaeology Laboratory
Peabody Museum, Harvard University
11 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman wrote:
>Hi all,
>My undergraduate student is working on materials from the 18th century
>Spanish mission, San Xavier del Bac, in Tucson, Arizona, southwestern U.S.
>The assemblage is nearly entirely cattle, with a few sheep/goats and
>chickens thrown in. Very straightforward until we came to two mystery
>specimens. We tried nearly every large/medium mammal we could think of
>(including human) and have gotten nowhere. They are very lightweight, and an
>unusual color relative to the rest of the assemblage. They look like many
>things, the left looks like a proximal metapodial or a podial (except that
>the flip side is an epiphyseal surface), and the right looks like a
>calcaneus epiphysis, but it's not right for any of the usual suspects for
>this region. We're stumped! Any help would be greatly appreciated, here is
>the link to images (articular surfaces and epiphyseal surfaces) on
>BoneCommons. Thanks for your help!
>
>http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/icaz/icazForum/viewtopic.php?p=989#989
>
>
>Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, Ph.D.
>Assistant Curator of Zooarchaeology
>Arizona State Museum
>Assistant Professor of Anthropology
>Department of Anthropology
>
>P.O. Box 210026
>University of Arizona
>Tucson, AZ 85721-0026
>
>Office: (520) 626-3989
>Fax: (520) 621-2976
>
>http://www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/bpavao/index.html
>
>
>
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