Fragmentary skeletal remains, trauma, and sampling biases: Quantifying antemortem traumatic data lost due to fragmentation in samples from Hasanlu Teppe, Iran (12th-9th Centuries B.C.E).
Document Type
Conference Abstract
Publication Date
2-24-2016
Publication Title
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
DOI
10.1002/ajpa.22955
Abstract
The analysis of injury data from fragmentary skeletal remains is limited by problems in counts, MNIs, and quantitative comparisons to other better preserved samples. For some settings, however, fragmentary skeletal remains represent the only material available for study and protocols that discard fragmentary remains from sample counts are not practicable. There has been little way of knowing how many instances of trauma have been masked by postmortem fragmentation because there is seldom a “control” sample where we may assume differences in levels of antemortem trauma observed are due to taphonomic processes rather than lifeways. The population from Hansanlu Teppe might serve as such a collection where it is possible to see the effects of taphonomic sampling biases in the collection of data: the Lower Mound skeletal remains represent very well preserved burials and the Upper Mound skeletal remains represent high levels of perimortem trauma and postmortem fragmentation with very little time/cultural differences separating the two groups. Using several protocols for the collection of data from fragmentary remains, we tested the null hypothesis that we would observe the same distributions of antemortem trauma in both samples based on similar lifeways for each group. For almost every element, we rejected this hypothesis with statistically significantly more antemortem trauma being visible in the Lower Mound Sample. We conclude that antemortem traumatic data is lost significantly due to taphonomic processes and quantify this loss to create a baseline by element for estimating potential loss in other comparisons in paleoanthropological and bioarchaeological settings.
Recommended Citation
Estabrook, Virginia, Hanna D. Polasky, Janet M. Monge.
2016.
"Fragmentary skeletal remains, trauma, and sampling biases: Quantifying antemortem traumatic data lost due to fragmentation in samples from Hasanlu Teppe, Iran (12th-9th Centuries B.C.E).."
American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 159 (S62): 181: Wiley.
doi: 10.1002/ajpa.22955 source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ajpa.22955
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/soc-anth-facpubs/36
Comments
Copyright and Open Access: http://sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0002-9483/