Environ Archaeol 2

The aims and definitions of environmental archaeology are discussed, with particular attention to distinguishing the means of the discipline from its aims. Contributions to biogeography and other disciplines are reviewed. It is argued that environmental archaeology can be seen as an ecological subject, concerned with interaction and process. This paradigm integrates all forms of evidence, including soils and sediments, and overcomes the discipline's tendency to be reductionist.

At Tofts Ness and Pool, Sanday, Orkney, fish bones dating from the Neolithic through to the eleventh century have been excavated, providing an opportunity to examine the development of fishing through prehistory and through the critical period of Viking colonisation, when it has been argued that commercial fishing began on Orkney. It appears that even in the Neolithic some fishing was may have been conducted away from the shore, and that fish may have provided more than just basic nutrition. Around the time of Viking colonisation fishing became more specialised, but so far there is no evidence of commercial fishing on Sanday.

The state of preservation of archaeological fossils may provide information crucial to their interpretation and for making curatorial decisions concerning the buried heritage. An established scheme for recording the condition of archaeological insect remains preserved by anoxic waterlogging is examined and found inadequate, failing to represent the complexity of decay properties and pathways. A particular weakness was its focus on whole assemblages rather than the individual remains of which they were composed. A new scheme is proposed which takes account of the heterogeneity of preservation in single assemblages, and makes use of a wider set of properties including colour changes. Range, mode, mode strength and distribution of values are recorded for the major properties (i.e. erosion or chemical degradation, fragmentation or mechanical damage, and colour changes). A form and accompanying flow sheet designed to ensure systematic recording of these properties under the new scheme are presented, and its success to date considered.

This note describes the organisation of part of a reference collection of bird bones, in a series of drawers. The layout takes into consideration a) part of the skeleton (all humeri, for example, are housed together), b) size (smallest species are in the first drawer, larger in the second and so on), and c) taxonomic position (within each drawer specimens within orders, whose labels are colour-coded, are grouped together). Empty cells, reserved for species still missing from the collection, serve as reminders of possible alternative identifications for an archaeological specimen and therefore help to prevent the tendency of forcing identification to what is present in the reference collection.