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Sullivan, 1978:185). Excavated samples are contemporary
in the sense that they contain information
not just about their original makers,
users, and discarders, but also about things that
happened right up to the moment of study.
Cowgill (1970:162-163) suggests that in order to
understand archeological collections, it is necessary
to think in terms of four different kinds of
"populations" of information that bridge the gap
in time between past behavior and the contemporary
archeological record.
First is the "population" of behavior that actually
occurred in an ancient society. Because not
all behavior affects material objects, it is never
possible to reconstruct all past behavior from
archeological material. Instead, human activity is
linked to the archeological record by what
Cowgill calls the "physical consequences population."
This second population is made up of all
the modification of form and location undergone
by material objects as a result of human behavior.
Between the time the physical consequences population
is created (tools are made, houses are
built, trash discarded) and the time of excavation,
numerous cultural and natural factors intervene
to determine what, where, or if members of this
population are interred, and if they survive
(Schiffer, 1976). Cowgill (1970:163) terms this
third, surviving population the "physical finds
population." It is the finds population that is
sampled by excavation to produce archeological
collections. Successful archeological interpretation
comes from an understanding of the chain of
finds, consequences, and behavior. This requires
that the effects of the various factors involved in
the transformation between each population be
understood.
The general model for extracting archeological
information described in the preceding paragraph
is illustrated in Figure 24. The terms on
the left side of the figure are taken from Cowgill's
(1970) description of the successive states of information
content. The terms on the right side of
the figure are taken from Clark and Kietzke's
(1967) description of the categories of bias affecting
the fossil record. The basic zooarcheological
SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY
Ancient
Behavior
Physical
Consequences
Finds
Sample
Report
c
Past
c
c
>^
N
Biotic/Thanatic
Cultural
Perthotaxic
Technologic
Taphonomic
y. Anataxic
C N
Present
N
Sullegic
Trephic
FIGURE 24.—A simplified model of the expansion and loss of
information in the archeological record (C = information
about human behavior contained in each state; N = information
about natural factors acting on the sample since
initial deposit).
problem is to find methods to estimate the various
kinds of bias, so that the information in a collection
can be partitioned between cultural and
natural factors. The best description of this process,
as it refers to animal remains, is found in the
report of a South Dakota paleontological study
(Clark and Kietzke, 1967). While Clark and
Kietzke's discussion focuses on those factors that
affect paleontological deposits, it is easy to draw
parallels to cultural biases. Biotic factors determine
which animals and plants are available in
a locality and are potential candidates for burial.
They are analogous to culture—the ordered set
of rules that determine what human behavior
occurs. Thanatic factors determine the probability
of an individual animal dying in the locality
sampled. They are roughly analogous to the variables
that determine the physical consequences