The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology

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taphonomy

taphonomy [Ge].
Literally, ‘the laws of burial’, in archaeology it is the study of the processes by which animal bones and other remains are transformed by human and natural processes during their incorporation into archaeological deposits, their subsequent long-term preservation within those deposits, and their recovery by archaeologists. The aim is to separate out and understand those characteristics of an assemblage that reflect past social actions in contrast to any patterning that might be the product of selective preservation or sampling biases.

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