August Stein
I’m back! This year I’m taking the advanced field methods course, instead of just the normal field methods course. The difference? I have a lot more responsibility and I get to write the report at the end. Being able to put my skills to the test has really shown me what areas I need to improve.
For example, identifying animal bones has proven to be significantly more challenging than the theory class I took led me to believe. After cleaning and drying bones, we need to identify each type of bone to its lowest identifiable taxon, as well as its type. It’s no small task, especially when the bones are fragmented. In one day, we managed to collect over one hundred bones. Multiply that over two weeks of excavation, and we have quite a task ahead of us.
Fortunately, we have Trent’s reference collection at our disposal, and it’s very helpful for identifying bones. Having a physical frame of reference to double check with is invaluable. Sure, that femur may look like it came from a lion if you hold it upside-down and squint hard, but what’s more likely? A lion’s femur was thrown in a kitchen trash pit in the late 19th century? Or it’s a fragmented piece of a cow, like the other hundred bones we’ve seen today. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any proof of Ontario’s infamous 19th century lion population, but we did discover that the people who lived in this house ate a lot of cows, pigs, sheep, and more rarely duck, chicken, and fish. The reference collection provides several examples of the morphology of animal bones, which helps to figure out what fragments belong to. Once we complete the analysis of these bones we may have a good idea of the diet of the inhabitants of this house. We are looking at what may very well be their kitchen scraps after all.
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