Bone recognition and recording with Cardiff University

We had the most interesting and worthwhile couple of days with brilliant people. I won't try to take you through the whole course, but we started with identifying the elements of our own skeletons and worked through to rebuilding the structure of animals. See the images below. 

The recording process was far more complicated than rebuilding a skeleton as we were trying to identify elements from sometime small fragments of shattered bone. But probably best of all Dr. Clare Rainsford (the course leader) asked to use bones from our dig for the whole group, so we took multiple bags and by the end of the day we had recorded over two hundred and forty bones and bone fragments. This was taken to the final analysis in which the results aligned well with the potsherd lipid tests we had carried out three years ago.  But also interestingly a higher proportion of cow was found than would have  been expected, sheep was a big portion but that's normal however, pig was higher than expected . Pig, as it would only serve as a meat animal with no by products, is often considered a higher status food in antiquity and the middle ages.

 It was a wonderful time and we've made new contacts some of whom would like to visit next year. 

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Roe Deer                                                             Domestic Goose                                                Domestic Cat 

Element identification - organised chaos ! 

Thank you to all involved with arranging this brilliant course. 

David