This site just keeps on giving
Jul. 2nd, 2013 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ossamentaI took a bag of bones and tipped them out. Thought "Wait a second…" and promptly put one bone aside. The rest went into a new bag, neatly labelled and put in the "someone else’s problem"-box.
Romans… *shakes head* Always burying people all over the place.
Well, to be fair, it’s something the people in the Iron Age also did. And then pits and ditches were dug into old pits and/or ditches - sometimes so old you wouldn’t know they even were there - and what was originally in them got mixed with new waste and soil.
From left: cattle metacarpal, very fragmented human pelvis and the shaft of a human humerus.
As an aside, this is why it's very useful to study both human and animal bones, even if you only want to work in zooarchaeology. Disarticulated human bones are rather common on rural sites, and they are not always so complete that they are easily recognised.
Romans… *shakes head* Always burying people all over the place.
Well, to be fair, it’s something the people in the Iron Age also did. And then pits and ditches were dug into old pits and/or ditches - sometimes so old you wouldn’t know they even were there - and what was originally in them got mixed with new waste and soil.
From left: cattle metacarpal, very fragmented human pelvis and the shaft of a human humerus.
As an aside, this is why it's very useful to study both human and animal bones, even if you only want to work in zooarchaeology. Disarticulated human bones are rather common on rural sites, and they are not always so complete that they are easily recognised.