Implementation of Pore-Space Surface Descriptors for the Characterization of Taphonomy and Pathological Changes on Temporal Bones

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Tzintzuntzan, Capital of the Tarascan Empire: New Perspectives" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This study describes the techniques developed to obtain a set of 2D/3D surface and volume descriptors from photogrammetry and tomography datasets that evaluate the pore space presented in a collection of temporal bones from Tzintzuntzan, Mexico. These methods could help to distinguish between taphonomy and pathological changes of the bone structure and the pores that could be related to otitis and mastoiditis lesions. The pores are modifications presented in diverse ranges of size, distribution, quantity, and localization. The parameters obtained per pore were curvature, area, perimeter, kurtosis, circularity over the surface, pore cylindrical factor, and pore central tortuosity. Also, group measurements of multiple pores were obtained, the distribution of the pores over and area, the clustering characteristics of the different groups of pores, and the geodesic distances between their centers. Three levels of characterizations are obtained, at the individual pore level, at each cluster, and finally the overall distribution in each bone. Finally, a three-hierarchy method is used to classify the bones and obtained clusters of bones with similar values at all levels. The method was used to analyze 41 temporal bones and the results are presented.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Tzintzuntzan, Capital of the Tarascan Empire: New Perspectives   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37391.0