Hello everyone, I hope you're doing well!
Today we are going to talk about
experimental archaeology we are working
on butchery activities so we are going to
look at the cutmarks made with lithic
tools on the bones so I have to go to my
slaughterhouse to buy six rabbits. not to
eat them but to cut them with silex
tools
Experimental archaeology: how does it work?
When we study an archeological find we
make sort of retro engineering. We are
trying to deduce the gestures that the
prehistoric man did through the
observation of the marks that its
gesture left on the archaeological
object. To validate the hypothesis we
raised we are going to make the gesture,
for real, under the prehistoric conditions in
order to compare the marks who just made
with the marks we observed on the
archaeological find. Okay so now I have
to cook these little bunnies so I can see
the difference between cooked and
uncooked carcasses in terms of number and
shallowness of the cutmarks
Today it's a very delicate process because
I have to clean the bones normally when
you prepare a skeleton for an anatomical
collection for example it's a very long
process you have to put them into some
enzyme and you have to wait a lot and
we have no time for this because we have
a PhD students which are going to work
on the cutmarks so she need the
collection for study and she need it
very quickly say I have to find a
process to do it quicker than normally
so I choose simmering water with a bit
of vinegar (white vinegar) and I have to
let them simmering gently for hours and
then I take the flesh off the bones with
my little hsnds and my small dentist tool
but very carefully because I don't want
to make marks with my tool I don't want
to completely ruin the experiment so...
and then I have to let the bone dry in
fresh air... Huh it's disgusting, yeah
experimental archeology can be
disgusting because, you can't
imagine the smell of the rabbit cooked
and then boiled and the vinegar and it's
it's just awful so I have to say that my
husband is pretty annoyed by that but
you know it's part of the game when
you're married with an archaeologist if
you want to marry an archaeologist you'd
better to be warned: it's the kind of
things your girl or a boyfriend is going
to do!
