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
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Telephone: 604-291-4255 Facsimile: 604-291-3080
http://www.sfu.ca/dean-gradstudies
