Introduction

Modern taphonomic analysis is (sometimes excrutiatingly) detailed, it is extensive, and it is intensive. The number of variables the analyst should and perhaps must consider is large, and tends to increase as the complexity of an assemblage's taphonomic history increases. I noted earlier, for example, that assemblages representing one or a few individual organisms signifying one accumulational and depositional event often tend to be easier to interpret than long-term accumulations consisting of multiple taxa and multiple individuals. It seems that the latter kind of assemblage is more common than the former, therefore the taphonomist may typically be faced with a collection of vertebrate remains that had a complex taphonomic history that may not be analytically discernable.

“Taphonomic change is sequential” (Andres 1992:39). Because taphonomic processes are historical, they are cumulative (effects of some processes obscure or destroy effects of earlier processes) and in some cases, one process is dependent on a preceding one. For example, carnivore gnawing may obliterate butchering marks on bones, or a highly weathered bone is unlikely to be transported to the den of a scavenging carnivore. What a taphonomist studies is how a collection of fossils differs from the living skeletons of animals represented by those fossils, and if and how the population of skeletons differs from the natural biotic population of skeletons.