Infant taphonomy

✍ Scribed by Hervé Guy; Claude Masset; Charles-Albert Baud

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 127 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1047-482X
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1212(199705)7:3<221::aid-oa338>3.0.co;2-z

✦ Synopsis

In almost all living creatures, in Primates as well as in seventeenth±eighteenth century human populations, a high infant mortality is the rule; therefore, the scarcity of children's bones in cemeteries is suspicious from a demographic point of view. Though possible in some cases, sociological causes appear less important than the peculiar behaviour of infants' bones in the tomb. This paper examines the physico-chemical properties of infants' bones and their consequences for the preservation of archaeological samples; it proposes a new way of approaching distributions at death in the past. # 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd