Todd’s Taphonomy: Addressing Questions Too Often Left Unasked

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Larry Todd has played a central role in applying taphonomy to studies of prehistoric human behavior. He developed standardized and, most importantly, reproducible methods of observational quantification. We here present studies of Trinil (Java) and Hadar (Ethiopia), both of which figure prominently in paleoanthropology. The results exemplify the depth of understanding obtainable from Todd’s taphonomy. Trinil is the discovery site of the first Homo erectus. While most studies concentrate on the hominin remains, the abundant fossils in the bone-bed have been largely overlooked. In many sites with comingled fauna and Homo fossils, it is often shown that the fauna was human accumulated; our results from Trinil instead show that the fauna, including Homo erectus, was likely deposited as a single hyper-concentrated river deposit. Hadar is the discovery site of “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis). Her bone breakage patterns are consistent with those produced by a vertical deceleration event (VDE), or a fall from height; however, others have argued that non-arboreal Hadar taxa preserve similar breakage patterns, thus discounting this hypothesis. Our work shows that the compressive and displacement fractures seen in “Lucy” are not present in the non-hominin fossils, and a VDE remains the leading hypothesis for the cause of her death.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37212.0