A practical guide for studying bird bones

"In general, my philosophy is that archaeology should be approachable and not this high ivory tower jargon that we've utilized for forever," said Ariel Taivalkoski, Ph.D., assistant professor in UAA's Department of Anthropology and Geography. Taivalkoski is the author of a new Cambridge Elements volume, Archaeological Bird Bone and Eggshell Identification, that serves as a guide helping to make her speciality within archaeology more accessible to students and scientists alike. The Cambridge Elements series consists of volumes focused on key topics, written by leading scholars from an array of academic disciplines.

Taivalkoski is a zooarchaeologist, meaning she studies the bones of animals that were eaten or used by humans in the cultural past. "[I study how] the ancestral Unangax̂ people interacted with birds from very practical uses like for food and for raw materials for bone tools to the spiritual ways in which they engage with birds," said Taivalkoski. "Birds are cosmologically meaningful in essentially every culture, even ours, even though we don't really think about it that way. And the way that people utilize birds and animals in general is really influenced by the way that we think about them."

Her book serves as a practical guide for identifying bird bones and eggshells discovered at archaeological sites. Taivalkoski referred to the volume as "essentially the first book to give you kind of a methodology for bird bone analysis." The work not only aids readers in identifying which part of a bird's skeleton a bone came from, but also guides readers through analyzing bird bones for signs of butchery and cooking by humans. Taivalkoski also contributes her expertise in analyzing eggshells using scanning electron microscopes (SEM). "And that is basically viewing eggshells at a really high magnification in order to determine the taxonomy of the eggshell itself," Taivalkoski explained. "You can see in some cases the type of cooking that was being utilized for the egg as well."

Taivalkoski developed her skills in bird bone analysis over the years from examining tens of thousands of bird bones in museum collections and from archaeological sites in the Aleutian Islands where she conducts field work.

"It just takes time to familiarize yourself with the different shapes that bones have [...] to really be able to accurately ID them," said Taivalkoski. "I find that people that like puzzles and things like that are a lot better at zooarchaeology, but it just takes time to develop any skill, right? You don't necessarily need to do tens of thousands of bones to get good at it."