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faunal assemblage - ✔✔the animal remains recovered from an archaeological site
kill sites - ✔✔places where animals were killed in the past
Zooarchaeologist - ✔✔An archaeologist who specializes in the study of the animal remains recovered
from archaeological sites.
faunal analysis - ✔✔identification and interpretation of animal remains from an archaeological site
Number of Identified Specimens (NISP) - ✔✔the raw number of identified bones (specimens) per species;
a largely outmoded way of comparing archaeological bone frequencies
Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI) - ✔✔the smallest number of individuals necessary to account for
all identified bones
axial skeleton - ✔✔the head, mandibles, vertebrae, ribs, sacrum and tail of an animal skeleton
appendicular skeleton - ✔✔all parts of an animal excluding the axial skeleton
Seasonality - ✔✔an estimate of the part of the year a particular archaeological site was occupied
Puna - ✔✔Native American (Quechua) term for the treeless, windswept tablelands and basins of the
higher Andes
ch'arki - ✔✔Native South American (Quechua) term for freeze-dried llama and alpaca meat
macrobotanical remains - ✔✔Nonmicroscopic plant remains recovered from an archaeological site.
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, Paleoethnobotanist - ✔✔an archaeologist who analyzes and interprets plant remains from archaeological
sites in order to understand past interactions between human populations and plants
Coprolite - ✔✔Desiccated feces, often containing macrobotanical remains, pollen, and the remains of
small animals.
Palynology - ✔✔the study of pollen and spores
pollen diagram - ✔✔a chart showing the changing frequencies of different identified pollens through
time from samples taken from archaeological or other sites
Clovis - ✔✔The earliest well-established Native American culture, distributed throughout much of North
America and dating 10,900 to 11,200 BC.
Phytoliths - ✔✔tiny silica particles contained in plants
Bioarchaeology - ✔✔the study of human remains in an archaeological context
Osteology - ✔✔Study of bones
burial population - ✔✔A set of human burials that come from a limited region and a limited time period.
The more limited the region and the time period, the more accurate will be inferences drawn from
analysis of the burials.
charnel house - ✔✔A structure that eastern Native Americans used to lay out the dead where the body
would decompose. The bones would later be gathered and buried or cremated.
bundle burial - ✔✔Burial of a person's bones, bundled together, after the flesh has been removed or
allowed to decay off the bones.
sciatic notch - ✔✔the angled edge of both halves of the posterior (rear) side of the pelvis; measurement of
this angle is used to determine sex in human skeletons. Although its width varies among populations,
narrow notches indicate a male and wider notches indicate a female.
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