Investigating the Impact of a Recent Wildfire on Tortoises at Cape Point, South Africa: Implications for Our Understanding of Ancient Pyrotechnology and Its Uses

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists commonly interpret burnt materials at archaeological sites as relicts of human fire use activities, but processes other than human fire use may create burnt materials. Here, we examine if wildfires would leave specific heating signatures regarding the temperature or heating pattern on the skeleton that would be different from those produced in a campfire by investigating the skeletal remains of 50 tortoises that perished in a 2015 grass-shrub brushfire at Cape Point, South Africa. We recorded element preservation and visually assessed burning based on bone discoloration; we used a multilevel statistical model to test predictions about burning location relative to tortoise position in this natural experiment, while considering the skeletal elements that were missing; and we conducted infrared (IR) analyses on the tortoise remains as well as reference bones subjected to an incremental heating experiment to assess burning temperature. Our results suggest that temperature presents a low-confidence deciding factor between wildfires and campfires while skeletal burning pattern may be able to facilitate this distinction, because wildfires tend to result in random and complete burning patterns on tortoises while campfires may produce more localized burning signatures. We propose further research that could help facilitate these distinctions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36880.0