Human Taphonomy

Despite an increasing literature on the decomposition of human remains, whether buried or exposed, it is important to recognise the role of specific microenvironments which can either trigger or delay the rate of decomposition. Recent casework in Northern England involving buried and partially buried human remains has demonstrated a need for a more detailed understanding of the effect of contrasting site conditions on cadaver decomposition and on the microenvironment created within the grave itself. Pigs (Sus scrofa) were used as body analogues in three interrelated taphonomy experiments to examine differential decomposition of buried human remains. They were buried at three contrasting field sites (pasture, moorland, and deciduous woodland) within a 15 km radius of the University of Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK. Changes to the buried body and the effect of these changes on hair and associated death-scene textile materials were monitored as was the microenvironment of the grave. At recovery, 6, 12 and 24 months post-burial, the extent of soft tissue decomposition was recorded and samples of fat and soil were collected for gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS) analysis. The results of these studies demonstrated that (1) soil conditions at these three burial sites has a marked effect on the condition of the buried body but even within a single site variation can occur; (2) the process of soft tissue decomposition modifies the localised burial microenvironment in terms of microbiological load, pH, moisture and changes in redox status. These observations have widespread application for the investigation of clandestine burial and time since deposition, and in understanding changes within the burial microenvironment that may impact on biomaterials such as hair and other associated death scene materials.

Human sacrifice (or animal sacrifice for that sake) has long been recognized both in the ancient Maya iconography and the archaeological record. However, it was not until the last decade that discursive information and material evidence have been more thoroughly correlated to benefit a deeper understanding of the ritual choreographies, occasions, and meanings for ritual human killings and subsequent body treatments, many of which include the fire exposure of human bodies on burners. The main goal of this paper is to present and discuss scenes of ritual fire exposure of fleshed bodies depicted in the Northern Maya Lowlands and relate these to particular ritual complexes and confront these with ethnohistorical references and fire-exposed human deposits from public plazas of major peninsular Maya urban centers, such as Oxkintok.

The objective of this study was to develop, test and evaluate a specifically defined interdisciplinary approach—the human-centred approach—as applied to a case study, Iron Age Öland. Four themes were selected to highlight different aspects of particular interest in Öland: taphonomy, diet, migration, and social organization. The uncremated human skeletal remains from Öland are the basis for this study. Different aspects of the bones, such as spatial distribution and chemical and physical properties, were investigated. The methods used include osteological methods, image-based modelling, isotopic analysis of bone (δ13C and δ15N; 14C) and enamel (87Sr/86Sr, δ18O), statistical modelling, and graph-based network analysis.
The great impact of the choice of methodology in the different papers was apparent in evaluating how the human-centred approach could be practiced.
The concept developed in Paper I, Virtual Taphonomy, provided deeper insight into the specific case study of Öland but also showed the potential of this methodology for archaeology and osteology in general.
The approach to migration in Paper II gave results differing from those in Paper IV. The use of a second isotope (δ18O) in Paper IV showed how some individuals were clearly not from an area close by enough to fit within the proposed areas in Paper II. Paper IV also questioned the definitions of 87Sr/86Sr baseline and the interpretation process for deciding whether an individual is determined as a migrant. While the population level approach to migration in Paper II allowed for a discussion on the mechanisms behind migration, the approach in Paper IV instead gave insight into the nature and expression of migration within Öland’s society.
In Paper III, it was demonstrated that a shift in diet (isotope variation) did not coincide with the relative typological chronology but instead should be studied by more independent chronology (such as 14C). The isotope results for Öland could also be interpreted completely differently today due to new standards for understanding how isotope values relate to human diet.
Paper V showed how a transparent analysis of isotope results, osteological analysis, and archaeological parameters could be used to discuss societal development using graph-based network analysis.
Using the human-centred approach to Iron Age Öland resulted in some new insights and a rethinking of society, particularly regarding diet and migration. The interpretation of the diet isotopes means that the pastoralist subsistence likely transformed the Ölandic landscape much earlier than previously thought. The dietary shift places the start of this in the final two centuries BC, not AD 200. In the Late Iron Age, the migration levels doubled, especially as women were immigrating. The people settling Öland were coming from diverse geographical areas in both periods, with the addition of more distant migrants in the Late period. I argue this is part of a creolization process in Öland in the Late Iron Age, detectable in burial practice and diet. The starting point of this great immigration is difficult to define as uncremated human remains are largely lacking in the period AD 200–700. Around AD 200, there is also a change in social organization indicated through the perceptible use of violence. I interpret this as a society where elders had diminished social power compared to earlier times, and when the increasing military focus throughout Scandinavia was also established in Öland.
In conclusion, the exploration of a human-centred archaeology gave new insights of relevance to archaeology at large, not just Iron Age Öland. In particular, the strong interpretational aspects of isotopes could be demonstrated, as well as the great advantages of applying digital archaeological theory and method to human skeletal remains.

Las prácticas mortuorias pueden ser escudriñadas por la arqueología, mediante el estudio de restos óseos humanos en contextos funerarios y no funerarios; en conjunto con los datos que proporcionan las fuentes históricas y las representaciones plásticas, nos aproximan al conocimiento de esa rica expresión de la experiencia humana a través del planeta. Su estudio en las sociedades prehispánicas de Mesoamérica tiene una larga tradición, paralela al desarrollo de la actividad arqueológica en la región, que ha permitido documentar los tratamientos mortuorios en estos pueblos a través del tiempo.

Vivianite is a bluish mineral sometimes encountered in archaeological deposits. It is notable for its tendency to change color from white or grayish to blue on exposure to air. Vivianite requires specific conditions for its formation—sources of iron, phosphate, and water, as well as low levels of oxygen and sulfide. Microbial activity is also thought to play a part in vivianite formation. The majority of archaeological texts do not discuss vivianite to any great degree, preventing a more detailed interpretation of site conditions and features. Vivianite was found in 25 exhumed burials from the North Brisbane Burial Ground, Queensland, Australia. Research indicated that bone or tissue samples for DNA analysis are best taken from areas distant from vivianite encrustations and that presence of vivianite has implications for artifact conservation. Vivianite at the North Brisbane Burial Grounds helped protect some skeletal and dental elements, preserved the impressions of metal coffin lacing, and also corroborated the oral history of temporary waterlogging and acted as a measure of pollution levels across the site. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The effect of air and water temperature upon the decomposition of human remains and upon biological activity has been extensively studied. However, less attention has been devoted to the temperature of the soil surrounding burials, despite its potential influence upon chemical reactions involved in the
decomposition of human remains, drugs and toxins, as well as upon microbial and insect activity. A soil temperature calculation equation usually employed in civil engineering was used to calculate soil temperature at various depths in a cemetery located in Brisbane, Australia, in order to explain the extensive degradation of human remains and funerary objects observed at exhumation. The results showed that for the 160 years of the site’s history, ground temperature at burial level had been sufficiently high for biological activity and chemical degradation reactions to continue right up until the time of exhumation. The equation used has potential in the analysis of both cemetery and clandestine burials, since it allows ground temperature to be calculated from ambient air temperature figures, for a variety of depths, soil types and vegetation conditions.

The practice of cremation is often interpreted as an alternative to inhumation, taking place shortly after an individual's death. However, cremation could be a final stage in complex mortuary practices, with previous steps that are obscured due to the heating process. This project reports on experimental scoping research on a set of experimentally heated femoral fragments from modern and archaeological collections of the University of Coimbra. Sixteen recent femur samples from eight individuals, as well as five femur samples from an archaeological skeleton from the medieval-modern cemetery found at the Hospital de Santo António (Porto), were included in this research. Samples presented five different conditions: unburnt, and burnt at maximum temperatures of 300°C, 500°C, 700°C and 900°C. Each sample was prepared to allow observation using binocular transmitted light microscopes with ×10, ×25 and ×40 magnifications. Results indicated that, if burial led to bioerosion, this will r...

Excavation in 2004 of an early medieval settlement at the “La Confiserie” site in Villiers-le-Bel (Val-d’Oise) provided evidence, within a storage pit, of human bone remains which had sustained anthropic intervention. The frontal-bone of the first individual showed evidence of cutting and fragments of partiallyconnected human bones discovered at the bottom of the pit also carried cut marks. The present article considers the questions raised by this particularly rare, or even novel, type of deposit. A brief presentation of the discovery context is followed by identification of the marks observed and suggested interpretations for the actions responsible. Lastly, the practices revealed are considered with their historical and ethnological context.

The Jungfernhöhle cave is located near the village of Tiefenellern, in Bavaria. Soon after its discovery in 1951 an illegal digging took place, followed by a rapid –to say the least– excavation campaign during which the cave was entirely emptied. More recently, in 2008, it was decided to conduct further research on the site, in front of the cavity entrance. The finds uncovered during these campaigns and the radiocarbon dating show that the cave has been occupied on several occasions, from the end of the Mesolithic to at least the Iron Age. Three of these occupations include human deposits, dating from the Late Mesolithic, the end of the Linear Pottery period (the most significant one) and around the middle of the 4th millennium BC.

The present paper wishes to present a review of the data concerning the Linear Pottery human assemblage, which has so far produced contradictory studies, but which is nevertheless mentioned on a regular basis to illustrate the various types of funerary or social practices at the end of the Early Neolithic. It should be noted that this review came up against several problems, in addition to those inherent to this type of series where the human remains cannot be attributed to individuals anymore and where immature remains are in a very high proportion: the lack of field records on the one hand, and the poor quality of the excavations on the other hand, during which many bones were lost, and above all a mixing of bones belonging to different occupations. Even though the scope of the conclusions that could be drawn from the review is of course limited, this study provides a certain amount of information, which can reasonably be considered characteristic of the Linear Pottery assemblage. 

The human remains discovered during the 1950s excavations represent a total of at least 49 individuals, 13 adults and 36 immatures. This is consequently an abnormally young population. And this is all the more true since the determination of the age at death of the adults shows that among the thirteen, at least five are under thirty, four of them being under 25. Moreover, the gender determination for adults and adolescents reveals a high proportion of females, one male only being assuredly identified. The palaeodemographic analysis confirms the under-representation of adults, with selection of the dead or natural mortality among an already selected population. It shows also, and this is a more common thing, a lack of very young children, in particular under one year. One the other hand, there is no argument in favour of non-natural mortality.

The quantitative analysis carried out on the remains testifies to an averagely preserved assemblage, regarding not the state of preservation of the bones, which is very good, but the conditions of excavation: most anomalies can be explained by losses due to the lack of sieving, and besides some of the missing elements have been found in the spoils. So, nothing proves that the complete bodies were not introduced as such in the cave.

The study of bone modifications shows a few marks caused by animals, some burning traces, cut marks on one single element, and above all a large amount of scraping marks, which predominate on large long bones from adults and immatures alike. The study also proves the existence of fresh bone fractures, of deliberate human origin. Fractures concern almost exclusively adult bones and are mostly predominant on large long bones and on the skull, which makes us think that at least for adults fracturing and scraping could be related.

All these observations raise one first question: how can we be sure that they concern the Linear Pottery population, since the human remains from three different periods were all mixed up? Truly, we cannot, but given the information provided by radiocarbon dating on the proportion of remains belonging to each period in the assemblage, this is by far the most likely possibility. The problem comes rather from the fact that the mixing may have minimized or hidden some facts, regarding the demography in particular, but the risk of being wrong thinking that the observations refer indeed to Linear Pottery practices is very low.

None of the two explanations put forward in the former studies can reasonably be accepted: on the one hand, there is no conclusive argument in favour of armed violence, let alone of cannibalism, and on the other hand the arguments which backed up the hypothesis of two-staged funerals are not admissible any more. But this is not a reason why we should reject the funerary nature of the Linear Pottery human deposits: there is no argument against this theory, even though this makes of the Jungfernhöhle the only identified example of funerary cave for the whole Linear Pottery culture. This is not the only uniqueness to this site: even though there are at the end of the Early Neolithic some demographic profiles close to this one, or examples of bones cut up and fractured, no series gathers all the characteristics existing at Tifenellern, and some aspects have no exact equivalent. Should the funerary hypothesis be admitted, what must be kept in mind above all is that the Tiefenellern cave depicts a long overlooked variability of the Linear Pottery funerary practices; this variability seems to increase dramatically at the end of the period, for reasons currently debated, but which will be fully understood only if we make the effort to place all the treatments of the dead at the same level, without rejecting what seems too weird to be of any interest.

Numerosos agentes intrínsecos y extrínsecos afectan
de diferentes formas los grados de preservación de restos
óseos humanos. La observación de la forma e intensidad en
las que tales factores inciden en las características del registro
osteológico de una muestra contemporánea con información
fehaciente de referencia (sexo, edad, fecha y causa de muerte),
ofrece la posibilidad de aportar datos locales para contribuir a
la comprensión de la compleja dinámica del proceso de descomposición
cadavérica y preservación del esqueleto. En este
trabajo se analizan y comparan estadísticamente variables contextuales
(anegabilidad y saturación del terreno, alcalinidad y
presencia de adipocira, de raíces de árboles y de envoltorio) y
tafonómicas (porcentaje de completitud, índice de fragmentación
y deterioro óseo) en 20 coxales humanos con objeto de
analizar, desde una perspectiva osteológica, de qué forma la
variación en el impacto de esos factores afecta los grados de
preservación de los esqueletos. Se identifican tendencias que
sugieren la acción de algunos agentes específicos, al mismo
tiempo que la ausencia de asociación de numerosas variables
aporta información relevante para contrastar con modelos previamente
generados. Se describen algunas asociaciones estadísticas
entre variables que afectan a los individuos femeninos
y otras que indican una tendencia hacia la preservación ósea
por parte de la acción de las raíces, en oposición a lo habitualmente
planteado en las investigaciones tafonómicas. Por
último, se enfatiza la necesidad de considerar variables poco
exploradas desde una perspectiva bioarqueológica, como la
saturación del terreno, la presencia de algún tipo de envoltorio
y la acción de la adipocira, como aspectos que afectan significativamente
la preservación ósea y por lo tanto, el potencial del
registro analizado para ofrecer información de interés osteológico.

Like other Mesoamerican societies, the ancient Maya deemed human sacrifices essential parts of a hierarchically organized cosmic food chain, which operated between the living human sphere and a divine anecumene. Native religious practitioners still offer copal and maize during today’s festivities and liken them to human flesh. Until recently, humans themselves were held to be a supreme »food staple«, which vitalised the cosmos at the pulse of consecrated time intervals. Victims were prepared and slaughtered in prescribed ways to liberate their animate essences effectively. In the aftermath of slaughter, the sanctified fleshly remains would often be processed and partitioned, and could be used as powerful trophies or relics. Although violence has been abundantly recorded in Maya iconography, only the last two decades of scholarship have seen methodological and interpretive strides towards a more nuanced study of ancient sacrificial practices involving humans. Recently, a combination of different disciplinary lenses has allowed the reconstruction of distinct sacrificial sequences from sacrificial mortuary deposits. In this contribution, I review the Maya mortuary record to document evidence of Maya forms of ritual violence and posthumous body processing. Furthermore, the procedures provide clues about the concept of the human body as a cosmic model and conduit. I close this essay by reviewing notions of ritualized violence as a form of instrumentation in political and militaristic agendas versus substitute violence as effective form of creating community among the Maya of today.

We describe the physical context of the Dinaledi Chamber within the Rising Star cave, South Africa, which contains the fossils of Homo naledi. Approximately 1550 specimens of hominin remains have been recovered from at least 15 individuals, representing a small portion of the total fossil content. Macro-vertebrate fossils are exclusively H. naledi, and occur within clay-rich sediments derived from in situ weathering, and exogenous clay and silt, which entered the chamber through fractures that prevented passage of coarser-grained material. The chamber was always in the dark zone, and not accessible to non-hominins. Bone taphonomy indicates that hominin individuals reached the chamber complete, with disarticulation occurring during/after deposition. Hominins accumulated over time as older laminated mudstone units and sediment along the cave floor were eroded. Preliminary evidence is consistent with deliberate body disposal in a single location, by a hominin species other than Homo sa...

Se examinan dos piezas repatriadas desde los Estados Unidos que, por sus características, se asemejan al estilo Mixteca Puebla de la época precolonial. El estudio inicia con una introducción de cómo se recuperaron ambos objetos que se encontraban en manos de un coleccionista particular en Estados Unidos, para luego abordar estudios detallados sobre la iconografía, la composición, las características físicas de las piezas y su estado de conservación. El trabajo incluye el resultado de los análisis de PIXE y técnicas arqueométricas aplicadas por la UNAM y el INAH.

http://mediateca.inah.gob.mx/repositorio/islandora/object/libro:470

We have assessed the histological preservation of naturally degraded human hair shafts, and then assayed each for levels of amplifiable mitochondrial DNA and damage-associated DNA miscoding lesions. The results indicate that as sample histology is altered (i.e. as hairs degrade) levels of amplifiable mitochondrial DNA decrease, but no correlation is seen between histology and absolute levels of mitochondrial DNA miscoding lesions. Nevertheless, amplifiable mitochondrial DNA could be recovered across the complete range of the histological preservation spectrum. However, when template copy number is taken into consideration, a correlation of miscoding lesions with histology is again apparent. These relationships indicate that a potential route for the generation of misleading mitochondrial sequence data exists in samples of poor histology. Therefore, we argue that in the absence of molecular cloning, the histological screening of hair may be necessary in order to confirm the reliability of mitochondrial DNA sequences amplified from hair, and thus represents a useful tool in forensic mitochondrial DNA analyses.