Taphonomy

Taphonomy is the study of what forces influence a deposit before, during and after burial. Reitz and Wing (2008, p. 117) define taphonomy as “The study of the changes that influence a deposit”. Orton (2010) refers to taphonomy as “the study of all processes intervening between a live community of animals and the records in an analyst’s database”. The concept of taphonomy was first coined by the Russian palaeontologist Ivan Efremov in 1940, and translates to “laws of burial”.

Taphonomy is an important part of the excavations in order to improve the archaeological recorded from various sites. One often combine the use of zooarchaeological data with that from other sources like soil, arthropods, plants and other biological and geochemical evidences.

Environmental conditions can affect the archaeological remains.

The changes that may influence a deposit can be divided into two categories. The first one is the first-order processes, which the archaeologists have no control over, and the second one are the second-order changes, which the archaeologist and zooarchaeologist are directly responsible for having created. The first-order processes yield information about human decision-making, the history of the deposit, and former environmental conditions, all which might have affected the deposit in one way or another. The second-order changes are the decisions made during the excavation, identification process and analyses of the material. All the changes of the second-order are in one form or another, the result of choices that are made by the persons performing the excavations. These two processes are also known as Biostratinomy and Diagenesis.


In taphonomy, there are five stages in the creation of the archaeological material. The first stage is disarticulation. It occures after death and as the organism decays. It is the dismemberment of the organism when it is no longer held together by tissue, muscles or tendons. There is no longer anything to hold the piece together anymore. The second stage is dispersal. The dispersal is caused by natural events such as scavanger, floodings and similar events. The third stage is the accumulation. This is when the material, both organic and inorganic, buildsup on one location. Fossilization is when the organic material have been permated by mineral rich water and formed a fossil, and is the fourth stage. The fifth and final stage is mechanical alteration. This is when the material is physically altered through events such as transport, burial, excavation, etc. It should also be noted that these five stages does not only come succesive after each others, but they also interact and effect each other. The processes in one stage will influence the following ones.

Two aspects to taphonomy that is important to keep in min, is that taphonomy can be reconstructive or descriptive. Reconstructive means here that one controls for bias in the material, and one works back from the observed assemblage. While descriptive means that one detects and describe the events and processes that are of interests. The ratio and balance between these two aspects varies depending on what research one are doing.

The deposits are most often divided into three generalized categories, the kill or processing site residue category, the residential refuse (which includes that of which are associated with smaller camps, hamlets and also urban environments), and the intentional burials. Each of these categories represents a different part of the human’s life and sphere.

A Lightning Whelk (Busycon Sinistrum)

Gavin and McGovern (2007) discuss the usage of taphonomy in collaboration with osteology to analyse the skulls found at the Viking settlement of Hofstaðir on Iceland. Among the things they look at is how the animals were killed and the weathering and conditions of preservation of the skulls. There was different weathering on the skulls which indicated different amount of time exposed to the weather and wind, before they eventually ended up buried. This process is a part of the taphonomy. All changes and events that might effect a deposit, from the death of the animal, to its categorization in a collection, are different factors in how the remains have changed during the course of time.

Our understanding of the past and its conditions are coloured by the present, and is based on theories of uniformitarianism. Experiments and observations made today provides some insight into the disposal patterns and gives us access to possible reconstructions of the chain of events. Although the examination of archaeological remains might give us some answers about the past, it must be kept in mind that it is our modern interpretation of the past and it is possible that some of the past does not have modern analogues that are comparable.

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Further reading

Gavin, L. & McGovern, T. (2007) Bloody Slaughter: Ritual decapitation and display at the Viking settlement of Hofstadir, Iceland. European Journal of Archaeology. Volume 10 (1), pages 7-30.

Orton, D. C. (2010) Taphonomy and Interpretation: An Analytical Framework for Social Zooarchaeology. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. Volume 22 (3), pages 320-337. 

Reitz, E.J. & Wing, E.S. (2008) Zooarchaeology. Second Edition. New York, Cambridge University Press. 

An introduction to the field of Zooarchaeology

 Zooarchaeology is both a field of study on its own, and a subcategory of the vast field that Archaeology is. Zooarchaeology plays an important role in todays excavations and interpretations of the past, but what is Zooarchaeology? And why is it an important tool in Archaeology? 

Reitz and Wing (2008, p. 1) has defined Zooarchaeology as “The study of animal remains excavated from archaeological sites to understand the relationship between humans and their environment(s), especially between humans and other animal populations”.

The presence of certain species at a site
can tell us about climate, dietary habits, 
and potentially also cultural and societal 
conditions. 

Archaeology is often defined as the study of material remains from human activities to understand the past and past cultures. Zooarchaeology focuses primarily on the animal remains from human activities and other related activities to understand the past.

Why are animals also an important piece of the archaeological field? The importance of animals in archaeology lies in the fact that they provide several important key parts of societies. They give us companionship, food, raw materials for goods for personal use and trade, they can be symbols of power, play a part in the religious practices, transportations and more. The animals even helped us become more resilient to certain diseases when we domesticated them (Reitz and Wing, 2008).

The animals are an important part of the past. In order for us to fully understand the material remains from past civilizations, we need to know more about the material. That is why we use Zooarchaeology in the field of Archaeology. Zooarchaeology looks closer at the animals remains that might other ways have been put aside and overlooked. 

Some examples of the direction the approaches one can use in Zooarchaeology can have, are: focus on the diversity of the faunal assemblage and why it is so, a more osteology oriented point of view, how the human’s usage of the animals have changed over time and how the species might have changed as a result of this. 

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Further reading

Reitz, E.J. & Wing, E.S. (2008) Zooarchaeology. Second Edition. New York, Cambridge University Press.

Animals as Social Markers

The use of animals as social markes

When we look at animals as social markers, we look at them as something more than just food for survival. All deposit made by human agency involves ritual, but much of the symbolic role of the animals leaves little or no distinct evidences.

A White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus Virginianus)

Changes in the social role of an animal might be similar to those associated with changes in the seasonal and temporal patterns, technology, the environment and the exchange systems. The ritual and social status might alter the archaeological records, if the status of the animal have impact on where, how and when the remains are discarded. The appearance of exotic animals on a site, are usually associated with migrations, colonization and acculturation. The usage or avoidance of certain animals in the diet, may be the reflections of dietary laws within the social boundaries of the society. The way animals are viewed in the spiritual world and the belief systems of a society can be reflected in the archaeological remains. The result of this may be that some animals were “sacred”, and thus avoided as sacrifices, on the other hand, others might have been preferred. The age of death and the season of death might give us some insight in the reasons for the offering.

Russell (2012) summaries that combining zooarchaeological evidences with artistic representation and textual information, gives us a richer understanding the symbolic role that animals might have held in the past. This is due to the fact that even though there might be absence of texts, representations and ethnohistory, we can get clues to the past belief system through examining the spatial distribution and the context of the remains. 

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Further reading

Reitz, E.J. & Wing, E.S. (2008) Zooarchaeology. Second Edition. New York, Cambridge University Press.

Russell, N. (2012) Social Zooarchaeology. Cambridge University Press.

The history and theory of Zooarchaeology

Zooarchaeology as a discipline is the result of a long process that is still ever-changing and evolving today. The zooarchaeological research has two interrelated goals; to understand the biology and ecology of animals across time and space, and to understand the structure and function of the human behaviour. Zooarchaeology uses the remains of the osseous tissues like bone, horn and antlers. Soft tissues like fish scales, cartilage, skin, feathers or muscles might also be used if they are preserved.

One of the first to use what is today zooarchaeology, were John Frere who in 1790 included the bone data from a site in archaeological work. His work went unnoticed and ignored until 1850, when Charles Lyell were influenced by Frere’s work. The Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup excavated in 1843 shell middens in Denmark, and deducted that these middens were not natural and were in fact created by human activities. 

A Southern Quahog (Mercenaria Campechiensis)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant theories were the Environmental Determinism theory, where it was the environment that caused the cultural phenomena, and the culture was viewed as a passive, rather than an active agent. The counterpart to this theory, were the Environmental Possibilism, where the environment might permit certain cultural developments, but there are always cultural alternatives. It was primarily amateurs without formal archaeological training. Archaeologists began developing interest for research that required knowledge of the context and function of the material in the 1940s. Worked specimens and remain would be described in the text, while the unmodified materials would only be mentioned in a brief appendix or note. An increasing number of archaeologist wanted their faunal samples identified by experts, but there were none zooarchaeological expert at that time. Zooarchaeology got an increasingly focus and importance as a field after this. 

It blossomed as a discipline in the 1960s as a field of study in the processual archaology, the “new archaeology” supported by David Clarke and Lewis Binford. Binford did several ethnoarchaeological studies that have helped give an understanding into some of the aspects that is common with zooarchaeology.

There are three facets in today’s modern zooarchaeological research. There is the methodological research, which focuses on the many quantitative and analytical methods in zooarchaeology, the anthropological research, which focuses on the relationship between humans and animals during the course of time, and the biological research, which focuses on work which combines the fields of archaeogenetics and zooarchaeology.

Sheeps are amongst the domesticated animals in which
the aDNA have been compared to the DNA of the modern
day desendants, in order to trace the domestication of them,
and subsequent also the spread of agriculture.  

An example on the use of zooarchaeology can be found when studying how the agriculture spread during the "neolithic revolution". The study of the genetic material in animals associated with agriculture have been examined and the evolution of the domestication of the species have been traced from the Fertile Crecent and towards the Central- and North-Europe, through the Mediterranean basin. 

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Further reading

Reitz, E.J. & Wing, E.S. (2008) Zooarchaeology. Second Edition. New York, Cambridge University Press.

Archaeogenetics

What are archaeogenetics?
Archaeogenetics is the study of ancient DNA (aDNA). The british archaeologist, Colin Renfrew was the first one to concieve and use the term for this subfield or archaeology and zooarchaeology.

In Archaeogenetics we use the genetic material of the faunal remains to document genetic changes to the species. The genetic material that is extracted from the remains, are compared to the that of modern species. This is based on the assumption that modern, domesticated animals retain features from the early domestic animals from the same geographic area.

Why are Archaeogenetics important as a part of Zooarchaeology? The zooarchaeological research relies heavily on the fragmented skeletal remains to detect the changes in animals. Because of the fragmented state of the material, ancient DNA, lipids and stable isotopes, in addition to the morphology, are important pieces of the puzzle in understanding and interpreting the data collected.

As Zeder (2012) discuss in her paper, we can see what is called the pleiotropic effect when studying Archaeogenetics. This effect may be the result of mutations in certain genes. Changes in the morphology is thought to be the result of the selection of preferred traits when breeding in the domestication process. The changes from the undomesticated animals and plants, to the domesticated versions of them in present day, is examples on the changes in the morphology that can be traced throuch the aDNA. These changes can be used to trace the path the species have spread, and together with dating of the material, they can give details on the timeframe for when the changes occured. 

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Further reading

Reitz, E.J. & Wing, E.S. (2008) Zooarchaeology. Second Edition. New York, Cambridge University Press. 

Zeder, M.A. (2012) The Domestication of Animals. Journal of Anthropological Research. Volume 68 (2), pages 161-190.