The bone pit

Cole Gauthier-Bough

      While working at a site named the ‘bone pit’, naturally you are going to find bones. Our site, OA-2, was likely a waste pit/midden meaning that we were going to find a lot of artifacts that were thrown away, including compost. Bones are crucial archaeological evidence as they give insight into the site itself and its inhabitants, providing evidence for diet, animal husbandry and lifestyle. On this site, we found many fragmented animal bones which can contribute to the reconstruction of their diet.

      The picture above is representative of the bones that were excavated, with most of the bone elements found being ribs, vertebrates, metapodials and the talus. However we found a variety of bones, these elements were just the most common. There are many things we can observe from the bones, such as that they were buried for a significant amount of time signified by the dark colouration of the bone, but also that the rib and tibia were cut with tools, such as saw. Many of the ribs and long bones found on OA-2 were professionally cut, likely by a butcher, and some of the sliced bone found, I observed them with having a visual representation of hesitation marks.

Figure 3 shows one of many cut bones that we found in our site, likely a cow rib. Visually the post-mortem damage to the bone was not caused by natural processes but human intervention, as the bone was neatly sliced (most likely with a saw). In addition to the hesitation marks, the animal remains that show evidence for being sliced were most likely done by a butcher as the cuts were very clean, and hesitation marks were rarely observed. In Figure 1 there is also another cattle rib, which we found several of, while on site that also demonstrated a lack of hesitation and being sliced precisely. From these bones, we can infer that the past residents of this site would’ve likely had a diet where they consistently ate pork and cow, particularly cattle short rib, leg of pork (See Figure 4), and/or some sort of steak.

      Another interesting find that gives insight into diet is the amount of pig taluses we found. We found seven taluses (Big day for talus fans like me). The taluses could be waste if the residents of the site got pig leg from the butchers and then made their own cuts from the leg or the pigs feet were a part of their diet, which is not implausible as ragoût de pattes de conchon is a somewhat popular French Canadian dish, so it is not uncommon for Canadians to eat pigs feet.