we know what we mean when we say
'subfossil': It's an organism or part of an organism that is not
alive and not in the organism, but also not a fossil. Since a fossil
is an organism or part of an organism in a rock, we mean:
Subfossil (noun): Any object that is the
remains of an organism, or a trace of an organism, that is
unfossilised. The object is not rock and is not preserved in
rock.
If you search for 'subfossil' in Google Scholar you
get 11,000+ instances of the term used in this way, meaning stuff as small
as pollen to stuff as big as the trees that made the pollen.
There are sub-fossil marine molluscs (which made me happy, since that is what I
thought I was studying), sub-fossil diatoms, subfossil ostracods, subfossil
prosimians (especially from Madagascar for some reason), subfossil birds and
even sub-fossil tracks. J G Evans, famous for land-snails in
archaeology, explicitly used the term sub-fossil for his terrestrial
snails.
However, I also could not find any formal
definition of sub-fossil in a quick search of the palaeontological or geological
literature. This is probably simply because they deal with
rocks and fossils, so if it' subfossil it's 'not fossil', and therefore
simply 'not their department'. I had hoped that sub-fossil, not being a palaeontological term,
must be a term in common use amongst Holocene palaeoecologists. However,
Berglund's (ed.) Handbook of Holocene Palaeoecology and
Palaeohydrology 1990 ('The Big Orange Book') speaks only
of organisms, and their remains in sediments as either
macrofossils or microfossils. Also, Lyman's Vertebrate
Taphonomy (Cambridge Manual in Archaeology 1994) (with which many of
us are familiar) specifically rejects the concept of sub-fossil in favour of
fossil; you are either alive, or a fossil.
So we seem to be using a term for which there is no
formal definition in our older sister disciplines (geology
and palaeontology). That might make many of us somewhat nervous, but
there are plenty of us, lots of us are quite bright, and we all seem to
know what we mean when using the term. There is no real reason we should
wait for the older sisters to define terms for us (after all, they can't even
tell us for certain what killed off either of their favourite critters, the
dinosaurs or the trilobites). So let's just define the term ourselves
formally: a ten-word paper in a well-known journal would do (how about it,
editors of J.Arch.Sci or Environmental Archaeology?).
Then it will be up to the geologists and
palaeontologists (Quaternary or not) to hunt through their literature and
prove they did invent it.
Greg Campbell