Research Trip Week One: Broxmouth Hillfort

Part of my PhD research requires significant comparative analysis – basically, many hours of analysing and recording other bone assemblages so that I can compare their characteristics with my main collection from the Covesea Caves. For my particular project, I had two objectives:

1. Find a faunal assemblage from a domestic context, sourced from a contemporary site in Scotland. This comparison would help highlight the “unusual” characteristics found in the more ritual contexts of the Covesea Caves, and could be used as a sort of baseline.
2. Use the human remains from the Covesea Caves as a comparative group in order to further explore how ritual/funerary handling of human remains compared to
   

For the first objective, I turned to faunal remains recovered from Broxmouth Hillfort, which boasts the largest Later Prehistoric faunal assemblage in Scotland. To work on these selected bones, I travelled up to Edinburgh to visit the collections at the National Museum of Scotland under the supervision and guidance of Dr. Jerry Herman.

These are the many, many boxes that contain the faunal bones from Broxmouth Hillfort.

So, how do I analyse thousands of bones in only a few days? Thankfully, there’s a handy little method for zooarchaeologists: bone assessments! Basically, it simplifies the analysis process into a shorter “assessment” that allows you to paint a broad picture of what this assemblage contains (for a slightly longer explanation, I wrote up a blog post about bone assessments here), allowing for patterns to be seen easily without spending too much time on analysis. This can be used as a form of preliminary work to inform where additional, more thorough analysis should be done.

An example of one of my assessment forms…pardon the chicken scratch that is my handwriting!

Sounds simple? Well…not exactly. Even though this isn’t an elaborate recording process, bone assessments still require me to lay out all of the necessary bones and identify them by species and element. So, it’s still a few hours of work per bag o’ bones! But judging on this week’s work, it was definitely vital and important work that will help me further explore the ritual elements of the Covesea Caves!

Tune in next week where I’ll blog about the human remains!

An example of what the “laying out” process looks like for assessment.

Comparative analysis has been made possible by funding from the following organisations:

• The Prehistoric Society
• The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
• Glasgow Natural History Society