Zooarchaeology Lab with Dr. Martin

Hi everyone,

Last week, the students of the WMU archaeological field school held at Fort St. Joseph attended a guided laboratory experience, with Dr. Terry Martin. Using his knowledge, skillset, and reference material, he worked with us to identify various bones from the FSJ collection. We were given bags of bones from the previous seasons that had yet to be identified and a booklet prepared by Dr. martin with graphics of the most common animals found at the site. White-tailed deer is the most common of animal remains found at the site and most of those that we examined in this lab were deer. Though, there were some vermin remains like squirrel and raccoon, as well as what was of utmost importance to the forts’ economic standing, beaver. 

Each bag of bones that we collect from the site can hold many different species. However, many are fragments that are so small or broken that they are unidentifiable and will likely be categorized as small, medium, or large mammal. When larger pieces of bone are unearthed from the site and collected, we were able to compare them to the reference collection of bones that Dr. Martin set up for us. This was the fun part! It was like a matching puzzle game, in a way. It was challenging to examine a withered piece of bone that was once recovered and then try to compare and match it to a cleaned intact piece. Some bones were easy such as a femoral head, while others were difficult like a fragment of an ischium. 

A number of the students walked away from the experience with memorable finds. Z recounts his rewarding experience identifying a humeral head from only a fragment of it. R.C was excited to identify a jaw; it was seemingly a deer jaw but with closer examination it was successfully identified as a calf jaw. Alex found a lumbar vertebra from a white-tailed deer, and was able to identify it based off of the upper arch of the bone. I had a couple of interesting experiences with identification myself. One of which was a small, long bone, that at first I wasn’t entirely sure of what it was. Dr. Martin looked at the bone for a quick second and found exactly what it was, a small squirrel femur without the head. The next find that stumped me for a bit was a small tooth; at first glance, I assumed it was a deer molar though it belonged to a carp, a fish not native to the area. The zooarchaeology bone lab has been my favorite lab activity that we have done this field season. I loved the workflow of picking out the pieces that are identifiable and then working on identifying them. Working under the guidance of Dr. Martin was very educational; he’s extremely knowledgeable on zoology and it was delightful to see how quickly he could identify the animal remains. We all had so much fun!

- Brendon