Taphonomic Analysis

Taphonomic analysis is the study of everything that happens to animal remains between the death of an organism and the moment an archaeologist records its bones, and of how those processes shaped the assemblage we recover. Coined by the paleontologist Ivan Efremov as the 'laws of burial,' taphonomy became a rigorous archaeological method through R. Lee Lyman's Vertebrate Taphonomy, which systematized the reading of bone surfaces, weathering, breakage, and skeletal-part survival. The goal is twofold: to identify which agents — humans, carnivores, water, weathering — accumulated and modified the bones, and to measure how much of the original assemblage was destroyed by density-mediated attrition. Because every quantitative faunal measure depends on these formation processes, taphonomic analysis is the indispensable prelude to interpreting subsistence and behavior from animal bone.