PZG meeting: taphonomy
Feb. 10th, 2012 07:31 pmI planned to write a rather late post on the York PZG meeting, but apparently I didn't bring my usual notebook, and now I can't find the one I used. But, fear not: the PZG webpage has a list of all meetings and minutes, so you won't miss what we talked about back in July last year. Seeing the Hungate site was particularly rewarding, for the sheer Oh. My. God. factor of the amount of bones. IIRC of an expected 1500 boxes of finds, they estimated that 1000 of those would be animal bone.

A selection of the Hungate animal bone boxes. There might be some boxes in the photo that don't contain animal bone, but there certainly aren't many.
I'm taking a break from the big EEK site (scheduled to work on that one until summer), as two smaller project had to be done right now. They're generally pretty standard with a few surprises. Today I found an otter jaw. Wild mammals (with the exception of deer and hare) are normally very rare in post-mesolithic bone assemblages, and I can't recall ever seeing otter bones from the UK before. I'm glad I recognised it right away - we have no otter mandibles in the reference collection... I didn't bring a camera today, so pictures will have to wait until next week.
But you got to see this: a 40 second stop motion video on laying out a skeleton.

A selection of the Hungate animal bone boxes. There might be some boxes in the photo that don't contain animal bone, but there certainly aren't many.
I'm taking a break from the big EEK site (scheduled to work on that one until summer), as two smaller project had to be done right now. They're generally pretty standard with a few surprises. Today I found an otter jaw. Wild mammals (with the exception of deer and hare) are normally very rare in post-mesolithic bone assemblages, and I can't recall ever seeing otter bones from the UK before. I'm glad I recognised it right away - we have no otter mandibles in the reference collection... I didn't bring a camera today, so pictures will have to wait until next week.
But you got to see this: a 40 second stop motion video on laying out a skeleton.