3 - TAPHONOMY IN PRACTICE AND THEORY

Summary

History suggests that the road to a firm research consensus is extraordinarily arduous … In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes familiar.

(T. S. Kuhn 1970:15)

Introduction

The foundations for taphonomic research were laid in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a focus on observations of modern processes that resulted in deposits containing bones with certain modifications (Behrensmeyer and Kidwell 1985). Early taphonomists followed the uniformitarianist approach used by geologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That approach and its present structure in the service of zooarchaeological taphonomy is reviewed in the second part of this chapter. Prior to that I review several examples of what I consider to be good taphonomic analyses. These illustrate what makes for strong conclusions and lead to a consideration of uniformitarianism and actualism as methodologies for studying the past. This in turn leads to a consideration of ethnoarchaeology and middle-range research. Finally, because actualism and middle-range research ultimately lead to analogical arguments, the structure of such arguments is described.

Examples of taphonomic analysis

The criteria I used to select the examples reviewed were simple. The analysis must be published in a generally available form so that the original can be consulted by interested readers.