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Dear zooarchaeologists, in my opinion, there are at least three kinds of "intrusive" specimens: (a) those, such as rabbits in British prehistoric sites, or domestic cattle in North American prehistoric sites, that have somehow become added to an assemblage dominated by specimens of an earlier period. One can be 99% certain that these are intrusive. They should be reported, because they tell you something about taphonomy (e.g. your site may have been disturbed by rabbit burrows) and the zooarchaeological information that you report might be useful to someone doing other research. (For example, someone interested in preservation of archaeological sites might want to know what kinds of sites are most likely to suffer from disturbance by burrowing rabbits) (b) there are species whose fossorial behaviour means that they may well be intrusive, but they are also endemic to the region (e.g. moles in Britain, gophers in North America). These should definitely be reported, and there may be a complex taphonomic analysis required to establish whether they were hunted for food, or were contemporaneous commensals, or were later intrusions. (c) And we shouldn't forget that some specimens "intrude" from earlier deposits. Anyone who has worked on urban British sites will be familiar with the problem of Medieval layers containing high percentages of "intrusive" Roman pottery - presumably deposited there as a result of Medieval people digging into Roman layers. Sometimes one can guess that different coloured faunal specimens from such layers may be Roman as well -- should those be reported separately, or as part of the Medieval assemblage? What if one finds a typical Roman species (such as a dormouse) in a Medieval assemblage? Again, I think we have to report in whatever way provides the most useful information. So I think the general answer is that one should report everything, but ensure that tables of data are properly contextualized by text and analysis. Jon Driver ------------------------ Jonathan C. Driver Dean of Graduate Studies Professor of Archaeology Simon Fraser University 8888 University Drive Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6 [log in to unmask] Telephone: 604-291-4255 Facsimile: 604-291-3080 http://www.sfu.ca/dean-gradstudies