Practice question · Select all that apply
What is "taphonomy" and why does it matter for animal-bone assemblages?
Hints
- The term covers everything happening to remains after death.
- It means a raw count is never a direct census.
Show the answer
- B. The processes that alter remains between death and excavation
- C. It means a raw bone count is not a direct census of what was eaten
- D. Scavengers, decay, and recovery bias reshape which bones survive
Why
Taphonomy is everything that happens to remains after death, chewing, weathering, sieving choices. Ignore it and you mistake a filtered assemblage for the original menu.
Practise Environmental Archaeology
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Environmental Archaeology
- Order the layers of a bog pollen core from oldest to most recent.
- Match each proxy to the material it is recovered from.
- A site yields no pollen at all but abundant phytoliths. Why does that pattern report the burial conditions…
- A pollen core is sampled every centimeter, and peat here accumulates about 1 mm per year. Roughly how many…
- Sort each clue: does it come from plant proxies or animal proxies?
- Two plants that grew side by side can appear in wildly different proportions in a pollen core.
- A herd's kill-off pattern — most males slaughtered young, females kept for years — is read as dairying rather…