Abstract
Two cornerstones of conventional wisdom in interpreting commingled assemblages are (a) the MNI provides reliable information about how many individuals were deposited there, and (b) the distribution of skeletal parts provides information about ritual processes such as primary vs. secondary deposition. Both of these involve assumptions about the taphonomic processes linking the original depositions and the assemblage which archaeologists recover. Yet, it is almost impossible to investigate these processes directly in ethnoarchaeological, forensic or experimental settings, particularly observing the effects of the passage of long time spans and repeated disturbance events. This paper reports an attempt to understand these relationships and processes through simulation of a hypothetical prehistoric collective tomb. The key results are (a) there is no linear or proportionate relationship between the number of bodies originally deposited in a tomb and the MNI excavated there; indeed, in many situations, for taphonomic reasons, the MNI quickly reaches a low ceiling and levels off regardless of how many individuals were actually placed in the tomb, and (b) lack of small and fragile bones provides a very poor criterion for differentiating between burial within a tomb and secondary deposition there following primary burial elsewhere. However, skeletal part representation can prove informative about other processes such as selective curation of crania and removal of bones from tombs for funerary use elsewhere.
Highlights
When archaeologists try to interpret commingled assemblages, the two most common questions to ask are: how many people were deposited, and how they were deposited? We conventionally answer the first question by inventorying the assemblage and calculating the Minimum Number of Elements (MNE) and Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI)
When archaeologists try to interpret commingled assemblages, the two most common questions to ask are: how many people were deposited, and how they were deposited? We conventionally answer the first question by inventorying the assemblage and calculating the MNE and MNI
The common assumption is that proportionate representation of all parts of the skeleton suggests primary deposition, while a relative lack of small or fragile bones implies secondary deposition, perhaps following processes such as excarnation
Summary
When archaeologists try to interpret commingled assemblages, the two most common questions to ask are: how many people were deposited, and how they were deposited? We conventionally answer the first question by inventorying the assemblage and calculating the MNE and MNI. The underlying assumption here is that there is a proportionate or linear relationship between the MNI and the number of individuals originally deposited; even if the MNI is only a rough underestimate, a small MNI suggests a small burial population, and a large MNI suggests a large burial population For the latter question, we typically calculate skeletal part representation. The common assumption is that proportionate representation of all parts of the skeleton suggests primary deposition, while a relative lack of small or fragile bones implies secondary deposition, perhaps following processes such as excarnation Both assessing MNI and using part representation to characterize burial ritual are reconstructive processes: we are using features of the preserved bone assemblage to reconstruct the processes which created it. The purpose of this paper, is to critically assess the relationship between ritual processes and patterns in the resulting element representation
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