late pleistocene population interaction in western europe

Figure 25. Schematic representation of the distribution of root etching at Saint-Césaire.
Marks left by several natural agents have been identified on bone surfaces at
Saint-Césaire. Among these, root etching is the most conspicuous type of damage. In the
sequence, root marks are most frequent in the uppermost Evolved Aurignacian EJM and
EJJ and, to a lesser extent, the Châtelperronian (Table 30). Integrating the spatial
dimension, root marks decrease more or less steadily with depth but increase with
distance away from the cliff. In other words, root marks are most common on the slope,
with a peak in meters 6 through 8 in the Evolved Aurignacian levels, and lowest near the
cliff in the lowermost levels (Figure 25).
These results duplicate the observations derived from bone surface preservation.
Therefore, root etching is probably responsible for a significant portion of the variation in
bone surface preservation in the assemblages, even though root marks have not been
identified on each specimen that has a damaged surface. The fact that root activity
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