ANT415H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Taphonomy, Human Behavior, Long Bone
Document Summary
Assemblage formation (decrease in size as you go down the list) Community of live animals in their natural proportions. Carcasses available to agents of bone accumulation (bones there due to people, or bones there because of a scavenger) Carcasses that come to rest at a site. Portion of death ass. that makes it into the ground. Destruction or movement of bone before it is incorporated into a deposit: what factors were redistributing carcass parts, and destroying some parts before burial, weathering that results in alteration or destruction of bone, animal scavenging/ rodent gnawing, human behavior (butchery, tool production, disposable practices, over what horizontal space these operated, what factors influenced the likelihood of preservation, acidity of soils. Research and curatorial decisions about sorting, recording, storing, and reporting: loss/ damage from transportation and storage, susceptibility to identification, adequacy of taxonomic comparative material, their relevance to research questions, how easy is the animal identified/ how experienced is the researcher.
