Taphonomy and Museums

CHICHKOYAN KARINA VANESA

Congreso; 7th International Meeting on Taphonomy and Fossilization Taphos Congress; 2014

Natural Science Museums are emblematic institutions in scientific investigation. These weredeveloped during XIX century, along with the exploration of the world. In that century, material culture and fossils from New World were relocated in different European museums. South American native fauna was one of the most required fossils objects because of the unique forms these animals had had. Nowadays, they can be found in museums from Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and even Denmark. This material was extracted mostly from Pampean and Patagonian region, in Argentina during 19th century and the first decades from 20th century. The excavation procedure used in those days distance from what it was established latter. No registrations of the stratigraphy, context or associations were done.It is considered that this material has original information that can be extracted with newmethodologies and incorporate into modern studies. In the investigation developed by the author, anthropic marks are search in order to understand the colonization or modification of native niches in first American peopling. Thus, a taphonomical analytical procedure is necessary in order to interpret the different agents that affected these bones.With the intention of systematize the data that can be extracted from these collections,museums (and the related excavation activities) have to be seen as a post burial disturbance factor in two ways. First of all, materials housed in museums are generally a selection of skeletal parts and specimens required in those times. In this way, they are a biased sample that lost their nearest information context. But they inform at a regional level, since most of the collections have the locality provenance. Taphonomy can be useful in order to detect natural agencies that acted at a large scale resolution. In this way, general ecological past conditions of the fossil samples formation can be reconstructed. This focus is comparable with distributional archaeology that gives importance to surface material. In these cases associations and contexts are also lost, and what it is found reflexes the activity of natural forces that acted at the surroundings. On the other side, museums are post burial agents since manipulation or restoration of thebones can add anthropic marks. In this sense, an historical view is necessary in order to analyze the skeletal elements. Through this way, the succession of the agents that affected the surface can be establish. Taphonomy helps to detect when natural and anthropic agentsaffected the bones: before burial, after burial or during excavations or when the material was store in the museum. Only when anthropic marks are detected before the development of natural agents, it can be interpret that hunting or scavenging activities were developed. If not they can be the result of manipulation and restoration activities or even the reuse of the material in the past. In this way, taphonomy contributes to diminish the post depositional bias of samples frommuseums and to interpret the information they contain. This is a novel axis of investigation that is being developed in order to incorporate nineteenth collection into new studies.