Formation Process Analysis

Both are formation processes that move materials into and within the archaeological record, but they differ in agent. Cultural formation processes, or C-transforms, are human behaviors — discard, loss, reuse, recycling, abandonment, and deliberate disturbance like digging or plowing — that determine how and where materials enter and are rearranged in the record. Natural formation processes, or N-transforms, are environmental and biological agents — decay, bioturbation, and transport by water, wind, and gravity — that act independently of human behavior. Schiffer argued that both must be identified before any deposit can be read, since each shapes what survives and where it ends up.

Because the materials on and in a deposit have been filtered and rearranged by formation processes between the living moment and excavation. People typically remove their refuse to secondary dumps, scavenge and recycle materials, and lose small items into cracks, while after abandonment natural processes decay organics, move objects downslope, and mix layers through bioturbation. What remains is the cumulative residue of all these transforms, not a frozen instant. Formation process analysis insists on reconstructing this history first, so that interpretation is based on the original behavior rather than on the artifacts' transformed final positions.

Taphonomy is the study of what happens to organic remains — especially bone — between death and recovery, and it can be seen as the part of formation process analysis dealing with the natural and some cultural transforms acting on biological materials. Formation process analysis is the broader framework covering all materials and both cultural and natural transforms. In practice they are complementary: taphonomic analysis supplies detailed evidence on differential preservation and modification of faunal remains, which feeds into the wider reconstruction of a deposit's formation history that the framework requires.