Before any anthropological study of the human remains can be undertaken, the bones need to be properly cleaned, identified, and catalogued. The cleaning process is fairly straightforward: the bones are washed with water and a soft brush is used to remove any dirt and small roots still adhering to them. The bones are then laid out on newspaper for a couple of days to air dry (not a problem here in Swaziland with the intense heat).
Once the remains are completely dry, the human bones are separated from the non-human (or animal) bones. In many cases this is a relatively easy task because many parts of the human skeleton are very distinctive. However, when the bones are fragmentary (or broken into a number of smaller pieces) it may be quite difficult to determine if the remains are those of a human or another animal. This is due to in part to the fact that humans share the same types of bones (such as arm and leg bones, ribs, and vertebrae) with many animals, particularly other mammals.
The next step in the documentation process is to refit bone fragments together. Again, this can be relatively easy to accomplish when bones have only been broken into two or three large pieces. However, when bones are highly fragmentary and consist of numerous pieces, sometimes smaller than a dime, this can be quite challenging. It is often like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, but with some of the pieces missing. Once the bones are reassembled, each human bone or bone fragment is identified, if possible, as to the type of bone (femur, humerus, mandible) and to which side of the body (left or right).
4 comments:
Interesting. One must have a lot of patience in doing that type of work. As far as you can tell so far, the bones you are working with, are they just human?
Hi Mom,
No there are some non-human (animal) bones. I am not a zooarchaeologist (someone who studies animal bones from archaeological sites) so I cannot identify the bones specifical, but there appear some remains from cows or other large herbivores. Cows make sense given their importance in many African cultures.
I don't believe I asked Laura last year, I know these bones were at the museum in a box or something, but was there no documentation on how they got there? from where? since there were animal bones also, what did they do, just put all bones together?
The remains come from Northeast Swaziland, where they were recovered in 2002. The remains were turned up by large plows or something on a Sugar plantation (which there are a lot of in Swaziland). So, they called the museum and staff went there to collect the bones. Unfortunately ater they brought them back to the museum, the human and animal bones, as well as the pottery fragments sat in the boxes for these past eight years.
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