Doctor, Doctor, Gimme the News: Bone Assessments in Zooarchaeology

Today I wanted to give you all a sneak peek into my current work – although I will admit that this is a bit more of a mundane part of my research. But zooarchaeology isn’t always exciting…sometimes it’s playing Bone Doctor and assessing bags and bags and bags and bags of bones!

Last week, I’ve spread over one hundred bags of bones across three desks. Why? Well, on one hand I like showing off my assemblages and work to my fellow PhDs in the office. But I also find it the easiest way to place everything in order of context.

Again, you may ask…why?

Bone assessments are quick (well, relatively speaking, I guess!) ways to, well…assess your bones! Prior to an in-dept investigation, a bone assessment allows me to get a general idea of what kind of animals may be represented in an assemblage, how the bones look, how they’ve been preserved, and how they’ve been treated. Of course, I’ll be doing a more focused identification and examination of each individual bone later on, but these bone assessments are a great way to get an idea of what I’m looking at.

Walking around my bags and bags of bones with a clipboard and bone assessment forms in hand kinda makes me feel like a doctor, really! Well, I guess in this case I’d be a veterinarian…and a really bad vet if I’m working with dead animals.

Basically, with these forms I sorta sketch out a picture of the assemblage – what sort of animals can I identify by eye? How many? What parts of the body do they represent? Listing things like colour, preservation, and characteristics like gnaw marks or butchery also allows me to get an idea of what these remains may have possibly been the result of. Is there many instances of gnaw marks from a large predator? Maybe these remains mark the end of one of their prey! Is there many butchery marks and charred bone? Perhaps this is the remains of a feast!

Yes, the chicken scratch you see here is my handwriting…I guess that really makes me more of a doctor, huh? The photo above is me attempting to make sense of the bone assessments – this includes tallying up total numbers of animal and element identifications, giving a (very) rough chronological order of the context numbers, and listing out the major characteristics I saw in each period. This way, I can really visualise the shifts and patterns that the assemblage forms as time passes from one period to the next.

I know this wasn’t the most exciting post this blog has seen, but I want to show off all aspects of zooarchaeological work! And that includes some of the less exciting things…however, I think bone assessments are really interesting – they almost give you a sneak peek into whatever you’re about to dive into for the next year or so! And while I don’t want to get into too much detail…I think this is going to be a really exciting and interesting assemblage of animal bones.

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