Human volunteers and mechanical arms: Quantitative and comparative analysis of bone surface modifications created by humans and machines

Summary

Zooarchaeologists use traces on bones to understand something about the ecology and subsistence behaviour of our ancestors. Although we may not be equipped with the proper interpretive analogues to understand the possible range of roles hominins had in past ecosystems, numerous taphonomic studies have investigated the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of natural and cultural bone surface modifications (BSM). Most experimental taphonomic research relies on 'naturalistic' simulated situations in which bones have been trampled, gnawed, fed to various carnivores, butchered, and shot at with projectiles. However, the physics behind the creation of a mark are poorly understood and difficult to control under these circumstances. This study holds constant the physical variables that affect actualistic assemblages, such as force of the strike, angle of the strike, or velocity of the strike, and measures how they translate to characteristics of BSM, such as their shapes and sizes. This is done for human experiments with volunteer butchers given specific instructions and in experiments using a mechanical arm where each individual variable can be held constant. Comparison of the two experimental datasets shows that mark attributes are governed by basic physics and that these laws can be applied to interpreting ambiguous marks in zooarchaeological assemblages.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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