The effect of dog scavenging on a modern cattle, pig and sheep bone assemblage

Date

2003-12-01

Author

Pişkin, Evangelia

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Carnivores have long been known as important taphonomic agents that accumulate and destroy bones thus introducing biases in archaeological bone assemblages. This paper examines how scavenging by two domestic dogs affected the composition of a modern assemblage comprising limb bones of cattle, pig and sheep. The dogs did not inflict any serious damage to the cattle bones whilst the pig and sheep bones suffered very heavy attrition. The density of the bones was found to have mediated the destruction to a certain extent but other parameters appeared to be more critical. The size and maybe the shape of the bones seemed to be more important since some cattle bones that had similar density values to pig or sheep bones received little attrition whereas the bones of the two other species were destroyed. The nutritional value of the bones was also important. Not only did the dogs preferentially attack parts with soft tissue attached but they also left almost complete the acetabulum of the pigs pelvis despite its low density value. Differences in the jaw power and individual behaviour of the dogs influenced the manner of destruction to a minor degree. When the same skeletal element from the same species was offered to both dogs, the fragments that remained after each 'gnawing' session were very similar. The variety of factors involved makes it difficult to construct destruction models that may be generally applied. To estimate the scavenging bias introduced into the assemblage, species proportions and skeletal representation tables were calculated by a number of methods usually applied to archaeozoological data. All of them showed considerable discrepancies between the original assemblage (the bones given to the dogs) and the recovered assemblage following gnawing.

Subject Keywords

Bone Loss , Dog Gnawing , Element Representation , Species Proportions

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=60949162346&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/84574

Journal

Archaeofauna

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Article

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Citation Formats

E. Pişkin, “The effect of dog scavenging on a modern cattle, pig and sheep bone assemblage,” Archaeofauna, pp. 47–59, 2003, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=60949162346&origin=inward.