Dear colleagues,
At the moment the warehouses in Hungary are full to beyond bursting with
finds of all kinds. At our museum, because of over-crowding, it is impossile
to find whole site materials let alone have good access to individual
contexts I might wish to re-examine once they have been analyzed. The
result is that excavating archaeologists are legitimately lobbying for parts of
bone and ceramic assemblages to be disposed of after analysis. The
question is: What do we keep and what do we throw away?
I was raised with the mantra - throw nothing away. That worked well in
the early days of archaeozoology where there were few space or money
issues with regard to curating faunal assemblages. At the moment I am
telling the archaeologists at our museum that all bones should be identified
and special bones separated and given inventory numbers whether they are
fom mixed contexts or not. However, I am permitting all other bone from
mixed period contexts (medieval and Roman, Neolithic and Bronze age,
modern and whatever) to be tossed with plastic tablets identifying them for
future archaeologists or saved for education programs for children. This
only accounts for 10-15% of the bone assemblages and my museum is
already lobbying for more bones to be thrown out. This has become
particularly difficult since non-archaeozoologists at the Hungarian Central
Excavating Authority already have a protocol that says large proportions of
faunal materials may be thrown away after identification, keeping aside
'measurable bones, burned bones, bones stained with metal, bones with
butchering marks, pathologies and bones from rare species. Everything else
is thrown away no matter how clearly dated the archaeological context. It
seems to me wrong to dispose of any faunal material from well-dated
archaeological contexts. But then again, what to do with bones from an
archaeological level where 200-300 years are represented? Roman contexts
frequently appear with dates like 2nd-3rd century or 2nd-4th centuries. Does
this mean those bones should be selected using the above criteria and the
remainder thrown away?
I really do not know how to handle this question and would like to see
some kind of real politique consensus from the archaeozoological
community. Principals are important but if we are too rigid the end result will
be that excavating archaeologists with either no longer collect bones or
decide what to save on their own without consideration for our finer
academic sensibilities.
Alice Choyke
