Fish Butchering and Processing in Archaeology: Proposed Methods for Academic and CRM Analyses

Summary

Globally, fish are recovered from archaeological contexts, but often a thorough analysis for how fish were processed is often overlooked due to time constraints or a lack of attention paid when examining a faunal assemblage. While the butchering of medium to large mammals is often undertaken as part of a zooarchaeological analysis, fish bones are often ignored or cut marks missed. This can be due to a variety of factors, including limited time and varying levels of expertise. This project addresses a series of variables for setting up a good basis for time sensitive and/or large projects to incorporate accurate fish processing data within an analysis. Experimental work, various levels of student skills, timelines, and laboratory space set-up were used to create a series of potential parameters that can be replicated in lab, classroom, and garage settings, to increase the likelihood of successful data collection. Two Late Prehistoric sites from the Great Lakes region are used to track the success rates in different settings for novice and experienced student researchers’ abilities to learn and distinguish cut marks on fish bone.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21240