An Investigation Into the Relationship Between Funerary Treatment and Bacterial Bioerosion in European Archaeological Human Bone

Abstract

A central problem in funerary archaeology is interpreting how the corpse was manipulated in the immediate post mortem period. The extent of bacterial bioerosion to the internal bone microstructure has been proposed as a means to infer the early post mortem history of a corpse, as it has been suggested that this form of bone diagenesis is produced by an organism's putrefactive gut bacteria. Under this model, different forms of funerary treatment would be expected to leave characteristic signatures of bioerosion in archaeological bone. Here, we tested the extent to which bacterial bioerosion of ancient human bones reflected funerary treatment, through histological analysis of 301 archaeological human bone thin sections from 25 European archaeological sites. We found that bioerosion was significantly influenced by whether a bone originated from a neonatal individual or an anoxic context. When these remains were excluded, bioerosion was controlled by archaeological phase in a manner consistent with known early post mortem treatment and forensic models of bodily decomposition. These findings suggest that microscopic analyses of bone have useful applications in reconstructions of funerary processes and provide some insight into factors that may control the persistence of organic biomolecules and fossilization.