Alteration of the metal content in animal bones after 2.5-year experimental exposure to sediments
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Alteration of the metal content in animal bones after 2.5-year experimental exposure to sediments Maciej T. Krajcarz 1
Received: 28 October 2016 / Accepted: 3 August 2017 # The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication
Introduction Fossil and sub-fossil bones accumulated in caves and other sites tend to form large assemblages. One of the primary questions posed by taphonomists that is especially important to archeologists, zooarchaeologists, and forensic scientists is whether a bone assemblage represents a singular episode of accumulation or is a palimpsest—the result of stratigraphic concentration or redepositional mixing. Radiocarbon dating may be used to answer this question; however, this method has three significant disadvantages: it is limited to assemblages not older than 50,000 cal. years BP; it is limited to well-preserved material that has been neither weathered nor contaminated; and it is relatively expensive. The alternative method is geochemical fossil provenance analysis. While chemical composition of the bone may be affected by some environmental and behavioral factors during life of animal or human (Balter et al. 2002; Martínez-García et al. 2005; Allmäe et al. 2012; Martiniaková et al. 2011), the concentration of metals in buried bones are usually much higher than in fresh ones, which indicates advanced post-mortem chemical alterations (Trueman 2007). Diagenetic parameters of bones, such as their chemical composition, are influenced by the environment, including the chemistry of surrounding sediment (Henderson et al. 1983; Wright et al. 1984; Plummer
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12520-017-0533-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Maciej T. Krajcarz [email protected] 1
Institute of Geological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences, Twarda 51/55, 00-818 Warszawa, Poland
et al. 1994; Johnsson 1997; Dauphin et al. 1999; Trueman 1999; Pawlikowski and Niedźwiedzki 2002; Trueman et al. 2003, 2006; Martin et al. 2005; Smith et al. 2007; Cook and Trueman 2009; Rogers et al. 2010). According to Kohn and Moses (2013), the bone acts as a sink for trace elements, causing the depletion of particular metals in the surrounding sediment. For some trace elements, it has been shown that the element content in the bone does not correlate with its content in the sediment (Nelson and Sauer 1984; Denys et al. 1996), which suggests that the chemical composition of archeological bone is affected by factors other than only the chemical composition of the surrounding sediment. Those additional factors may include not only moisture, porosity, pH, redox conditions, climate, and time (Pate and Hutton 1988; Nielsen-Marsh and Hedges 2000b; Smith et al. 2007; Trueman 2007) but also the valence and ionic radii of accessible competing cations due to different fit to the crystal lattice of the bone apatite (Kohn and Moses 2013). Accordingly, Trueman et al. (2006), Denys et al. (1996), and Iliopoulos e
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