Saturday, February 16, 2008

Silence of the Lambs

Sometimes we see things out here that haven't quite turned into archaeology yet. The white smear you see in the picture above is one of those. Hard to tell what it is at a distance.

When you get a little closer you can see that it is a scatter of animal bone.


My colleague Liz has some experience as a faunal analyst and says these look like lambs. She got a body count of 14 individuals.


None of them had been butchered out. All were still fully articulated like the one you can see here. We're betting someone had some sick animals and he put them out of their misery.

We're obligated to record things at least 50 years old as historic resources and these didn't appear to fit into that category.

2 comments:

mdmnm said...

I'm sure some coyote suddenly thought he'd hit the jackpot. I'm sure that for a week or so, living was easy.

Reid Farmer said...

You're right - it must have been a happy time