Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 08/11/2008 - 10:35
Forums
Kuril Islands Biocomplexity 08

Dear KBP team,

    I know that the middens have all sorts of cool stuff in them, but modern landfills attract things like rats and crows. Do the middens attract local scavengers such as foxes?

just curios,

    Aaron Goldfogel 

Wed, 08/13/2008 - 10:35

KBP Team

Aaron - Yes, absolutely! And it can be a big problem for zooarchaeologists like myself! Scavengers like foxes, and especially dogs, which have been living with people for thousands of years all over the world, really like to chew on bones. We don't really have any way of measuring how much material they might have removed from a midden in the past (once they are buried they aren't very attractive to scavengers), but we can measure how many of the bones we find have gnaw marks on them. Fortunately for the KBP project, only a very low proportion of the bones we have recovered so far have gnaw marks on them!-- Dr. E.