The extent of deamidation was found to be influenced more by burial conditions and thermal age than, for example, chronological age, the extent of bioerosion or crystallinity. The method lends itself mostly to screening heterogenic deposits of bone to identify outliers.
It is generally a challenge to interpret incomplete and degraded skeletal assemblages found during archaeological excavations. Several events after the death of animals and humans, before and during burial, will have influenced the situation as seen upon excavation. This postmortem sequence of events can be called the taphonomic history of bones. Taphonomic signatures as detected using histology can provide additional data on deposition/burial and the evolution of the burial environment. This article reports on the results of a histological characterisation of diagenetic alterations in a bone assemblage from the Roman period burial and settlement site of Castricum, located in the province of Noord-Holland in the Netherlands. The aim is to assess the relationship between bone histology and known taphonomic events. Both transmitted light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy were used to investigate histological changes. In 1995, the excavation at Castricum uncovered the skeletal material of humans and a variety of animal species that had received different burial treatments. The humans, as well as some dogs and cattle, were buried as complete inhumations. The skeletal remains of horses provided evidence of surface exposure before deposition. In addition, both environmental changes (e.g. variations in groundwater levels) and disturbances by later human activity are known to have occurred since the internment of the bones. Together with the animal refuse bones from the site, this assemblage provides an excellent opportunity to investigate the relationship between early taphonomy, burial conditions and histological appearance. The complex taphonomic history of the Castricum skeletal material was found to be reflected in several characteristic alterations of the bone microstructure such as the extent of bioerosion, cracking, staining and inclusions of framboidal pyrite crystals. This allowed for the reconstruction of a postmortem sequence of events.
Archaeological bone undergoes alterations after burial (diagenesis) that constitute a problem for the survival of archaeological information. A common method to assess this alteration is Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR). However, the commonly applied method (FTIR–KBr) is destructive and sample preparation may influence the results. This paper tests the suitability of FTIR attenuated total reflection (FTIR–ATR), a method not commonly used to investigate bone diagenesis. FTIR–ATR requires less sample preparation and can be non‐destructive, allowing analysis of bone cross‐sections. Modern and archaeological bones were analysed using both methods and different sample preparation methods were tested. The results show that FTIR–ATR has advantages for the rapid assessment of bone diagenesis.
Bone collagen is found throughout most of the archaeological record. Under experimental conditions, collagen is apparently preserved as an intact molecule, with amino acid compositions and isotopic profiles only changing when almost all of the protein is lost. The ubiquity of collagen in archaeological bone has lead to the development of the use of collagen peptide mass fingerprints for the identification of bone fragmentsZooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS). We report a novel, but a simple method for the partial extraction of collagen for ZooMS that uses ammonium bicarbonate buffer but avoids demineralisation. We compared conventional acid demineralisation with ammonium bicarbonate buffer extraction to test ZooMS in a range of modern and archaeological bone samples. The sensitivity of the current generation of mass spectrometers is high enough for the non-destructive buffer method to extract sufficient collagen for ZooMS. We envisage that a particular advantage of this method is that it leaves worked bone artefacts effectively undamaged post-treatment, suitable for subsequent analysis or museum storage or display. Furthermore, it may have potential as a screening tool to aid curators in the selection of material for more advanced molecular analysis-such as DNA sequencing.
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