Absence of bones in archaeological sites from the southeast of Uruguay: Taphonomy or human behavior?

Abstract

The rework of daily refuse, including large quantities of faunal remains, is a common explanation for earthen mound construction in the Uruguayan lowlands, which started about 5000 years ago. While some earthen mounds contain human and animal bones in high abundance, several others contain only a few fragments.Thousands of years later (17th to 18th centuries), stone structures known as cairns were used in the same region and are believed to have served as the burial ground for local chiefs. However, no bone remains were ever found during excavations. The acidity of local soils has been the common explanation for the low frequency and/or complete absence of bone remains in earthen mounds and cairns. To investigate the | © 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC Scientific editing by Carolina Mallol

Sinais antropogênicos em sítios abrigados areníticos e calcários no vale do Ribeira e na bacia do rio Corumbataí, SP, Brasil: uma abordagem geoarqueológica

“…A Figura 19 sintetiza a cascata de forma gráfica, que pode ser resumida a seguir: Diversos outros minerais podem ser formados, dependendo de vários fatores (ver Shahack- Gross et al, 2004;Friesem et al, 2021). Mas o importante nesta seção é enfatizar que o estudo dos fosfatos autigênicos mediante o conhecimento da sua estabilidade química é, portanto, uma das formas de abordar a presença/ausência atual de ossos e cinzas calcíticas num sítio abrigado (Weiner et al, 1993;Karkanas, 2010;Villagran et al, 2022). Nesse sentido, é adotada aqui a recente proposta de Karkanas e Goldberg (2018, p. 225) de distinguir entre dois tipos de amostragem: regular e estratégica.…”