A New Semi-quantitative Method for Identifying Carnivore-Specific Chewing Damage Patterns

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating 20 Years of Support: Current Work by Recipients of the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship for Zooarchaeologists" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Hypotheses of hominin scavenging from different felid species have been proposed, but the ability to distinguish between the taphonomic patterns inflicted by different felid species in the fossil record is currently underdeveloped. Previous efforts to identify taxon-specific taphonomic patterns inflicted by felids, which have largely focused on tooth marks, have not yielded promising results. As a Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship recipient in 2000, Briana Pobiner’s research project was focused on identifying carnivore taxon-specific bone damage patterns. Here, Pobiner and two coauthors build on her earlier work by presenting a new low-cost, low-tech, semi-quantitative method for coding carnivore-inflicted gross bone damage patterns, including a visual guide to different levels of bone damage inflicted on different skeletal elements and portions. A blind test of this method by three experienced taphonomic analysts indicates that this method is easy to use and results in consistent data across analysts. We also apply this method to quantify the intensity of damage that free-ranging African lions inflicted on zebra bones as a first step in identifying felid-specific taphonomic signatures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Celebrating 20 Years of Support: Current Work by Recipients of the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship for Zooarchaeologists

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32524