While there is no general consensus, small, medium, and large will have
completely different meanings in the New World versus some place like
Africa. From what I have read, much of our large Holocene fauna isn't
considered so large in Africa, but medium-sized.
I like to use example taxa to give an idea of what is meant for a given
category. This is done for each class - so mammals will have example taxa
to indicate mammal sizes, birds will have their own representatives, and so
on. Some analysts prefer to give animal sizes in live animal weights. This
is great for other zooarchaeologists, but for many of the archaeologists
using the information, they have no idea how much various species of animals
weigh and so examples seem to help the process of conveying information on
what is meant by a given category of size.
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