A Case Study of Inadvertent Discovery: Misidentification of Human Infant Remains in a Faunal Assemblage

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Previous bioarchaeological literature has reported that infant and perinatal human remains have been misidentified in the past, either in the field during excavation or during laboratory analysis. The misidentification of these individuals is due to a variety of reasons, including their small size, their fragility often resulting in postmortem fragmentation, their morphology is often confused with small mammals and bird bones, and the overall lack of training for field and laboratory technicians in perinatal and infant human osteology.

This poster presents a case study that was prompted by the inadvertent discovery of neonatal remains while processing a large faunal assemblage from a Fort Ancient settlement site in West Virginia. The collection was initially sorted by archaeologists after excavation in the 1970s and again by a master’s student in the 1980s; however, during the current project, the authors identified perinatal and infant human remains. Misidentification creates two major problems. First, it results in inaccurate archaeological reconstructions of variation in mortuary practices. Secondly, if individuals are not identified during inventorying, it creates an obstacle for repatriation of the smallest and most vulnerable Ancestors. Laboratory technicians working with faunal assemblages should be trained in identifying adult and subadult human remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53787