Small predator accumulations, taphonomy and palaeoenvironment: about practices and reference establishment
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7 septembre 2016
- handle: 10670/1.8xyln0
- hal: hal-02985419
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Predaceous animals Predators Predacious animals Fauna Native fauna Native animals Beasts Wildlife Wild animals Animal kingdomCiter ce document
Christiane Denys et al., « Small predator accumulations, taphonomy and palaeoenvironment: about practices and reference establishment », HAL-SHS : archéologie, ID : 10670/1.8xyln0
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Small vertebrates and invertebrates are very abundant and generally are good palaeoecological indicators. It is now well recognized that most of small animals’ accumulations in archaeological and palaeontological sites result from predation. Many neotaphonomic studies have been established as references that allow to deduce more or less precisely the origin of a fossil assemblage. By analogy, the predator habitat is used to infer the past one. However, currently, we are still far from having an exhaustive knowledge of modern predators’ diet, ecological niches and bone modification patterns. Moreover, a browse of literature data shows that the establishment of reference is the result of isolated initiatives of palaeontologists, generally taxon specialized and not always published. By the fact, only 108 taphonomic studies for avian predators and 60 for small mammalian carnivores are yet available. Moreover, the reference collections are not always catalogued, deposited in museum or institutions, or even published. There is a need to make these data available to the community and homogenize practices to gain better taphonomic and palaeoecological informations from small animals’ accumulations resulting from predation. We present here some methodological proposals resulting from a workshop were we discussed about respective practices and actions. Then, taking as example pellets from a Moroccan accumulation of Tyto alba nest including various taxa (aves, rodents, shrews, herpetofauna, insects) we propose here a new taphonomic method of study for multi-taxa assemblages.