Collecting Bones

Field Notes No. 11

Among many strange habits of archaeologists, collecting dead animal parts is among the strangest. It breeds a habit of scanning the highway right-of-way for fresh roadkill to throw in the back. Another pronghorn? I’ll resist. But a badger? Hell yes. Those bones are probably pretty neat.

I’d guess bone collecting is specific to hunter-gatherer archaeologists whose sites are filled with wild animal bones. We identify those ancient bones by comparing them to modern ones, and in this way justify our odd habit of amassing dead stuff in the name of science. That’s what we tell ourselves anyway, as our colleagues over in the Classics collect fine wine and art.

Most recently I’ve convinced myself that I need more bones of baby cows and bison, and alot of them. I keep running across a problem for which I don’t currently have a great solution: aging bison bones in the absence of skulls. Bovid (cow and bison) bones develop to maturity over the course of several years. The floating fragments of vertebrae, legs, pelvises, and ribs present at birth gradually fuse together throughout bovid adolescence to form the 207 fully fused bones in an adult bovid, roughly the same number as humans. Archaeologists currently have a tenuous grasp on how this process occurs, so when we find unfused bison bones in our sites there’s not a great way to tell how old that animal was when it died. And that’s why I want 8 or 10 bovid skeletons between the ages of 0 and 5.

This little side project recently led to me to the distant northern outskirts of Cheyenne, Wyoming, where a friend/coworker operates a small cow-calf operation on 40 acres of treeless plains. The Deniz Family Ranch is just getting off the ground, but it already produces some quality Black Angus, the gold standard for beef cattle in these parts. Unfortunately for the patriarch of the operation, one of his cows delivered a calf that died shortly after birth, likely smothered by its mother. Not so unfortunate for me.

I’ve been putting out feelers for dead animals for a few months to small-scale beef and bison operations with the intent of collecting animals for this project. The problem to date is that young animals often live and die out on the range without a great understanding of when they were born nor when they died. Building a network of small-scale ranchers for whom every animal counts might help mitigate the problems inherent to obtaining animals from mega-ranches for whom each animal is just another drop in the bucket of a (relatively) substantial beef profit.

The Deniz Ranch is one of those ranches. I got a call from Conrado Deniz around 11:00 on the morning after the poor thing died, a Friday. I’d been talking this thing up, but I was admittedly unprepared to follow through. “Well, we lost one last night and I told you I’d give you a call, so here it is,” Deniz said in his introduction. “Oh! Crazy. Let me make some phone calls and see if I can pull this off,” I responded.

When you need an animal for its skeleton, it’s best not to delay the process. Even a day or two risks scavenging by coyotes or cats and guarantees an unpleasant butchery. Luckily, one of my staff answered the call to devote his Friday afternoon and evening to the task. Eli, our bioarchaeologist, is both a decent hunter and an expert on bones, so he stepped up. Bonus: he already has a hanging rack (gambrel) for animal processing in his garage.

We left Laramie by 1:30 pm, excited for an excuse to abandon report writing and lab tending for a relevant, if extracurricular, task. We listened to the new My Morning Jacket record across the Laramie Range and discussed the plan. “We should just stop on the way back and gut it on the Forest,” I suggested. “Hopefully nobody stops to wonder why we’re butchering a calf on a Forest Road,” Eli responded. Good point. We ultimately decided to butcher the thing entirely in Eli’s garage. And with stone tools. I put out a call to my colleague Randy and received in response a small team of graduate students eager to join.

We arrived to the Deniz Ranch and followed directions to the deceased calf, lying just outside a corral in which the herd resided, braying as we approached. The 70 pound bull calf was scrawny, the contours of its bones protruding through its thin, soft hide. Flies buzzed around his face, landing on his hanging togue and manically circling about his gaping eyes. He had a spot worn raw through his hide posthumously by his mother’s incessant licking, a futile attempt to revive her progengy after it passed. She looked on as we loaded her newborn into my truck bed.

I think we were all a little moved by the scene. The death of innocents inspires a primal sadness. But we didn’t talk about all that in the moment. Conrado invited us in for a tour of his place and we drank a couple Michelob’s in his garage, trading stories about arrowheads and wives, mainly. Eli and I excused ourselves and trekked back to Laramie, stopping briefly for pizza and beer.

We unloaded the calf onto a blue tarp in the garage and rifled through flint knapping materials for processing tools. I culled 6 or 8 obsidian, chert, and quartzite flakes from the 5 gallon bucket of reject material and, making it science-y and all, weighed and numbered them. The students arrived, we wolfed down some thoroughly mediocre frozen pizza, and then got into it.

About half of us, including me, had processed large animals with knives before, but none of us had ever done it start to finish with stone tools, nor had any of us butchered a cow. Experimenting with stone tools isn’t typically a priority at the tail end of an arduous elk or deer hunt when you need to get the meat into cold storage and there is no “cow season” in Wyoming…yet. It was a new experience all around.

Eli made the first cuts as I stood by taking notes, periodically capturing photos. I came up with a basic procedure for systematically documenting the process on the drive back from Cheyenne, loosely inspired by a bison butchery experiment conducted by Metin Erin and Dave Meltzer with the popular media company Meateater. As participants picked up a stone flake and began cutting, I noted the tool number, person, task, and time, and then the time they stopped or switched tools. I also noted when each tool was resharpened and general observations made by participants.

The butchery process would sound familiar to any outdoorsman. We made two slits between the bone and achilles tendon of the hind limbs and strung the calf from a pulley hoist gambrel. We made a long slit down the belley and through the sternum (with stone!), removed the entrails into a bucket, and cut the hide back from the torso and forelimbs with short precise strokes. Once the hide was removed, we made quick work of removing the forelimbs. A couple students deboned the forelimbs as others stripped the backstraps, tenderloins, and hindlimbs. We severed the upper torso from the hind limbs between two of the lumbar vertebrae and deboned a few final elements before calling it quits. The process took about 2 hours and 40 minutes and yielded about 17 pounds of meat, not including the entrails. We took our time.

The stone tools worked great. The experiment just okay. Things got pretty chaotic as students got more comfortable with the process and I drank more beer. I thought the unmodified flakes we used for the butchery might work well for certain tasks and not others. Hide removal but not disarticulation, for instance. But they handled all aspects of the process well, especially the obsidian, which the students quickly figured out and utilized extensively. Occasional retouching put some “teeth” into the edges that rejuvenated their usefulness once they dulled.

I returned home by midnight with a couple trash bags full of partially defleshed calf parts and stored them in my chest freezer atop the bacon and New York strips. I transferred the calf several days later to a campus freezer at my wife’s pleading request. From here, I’ll thaw the remains, process them further, dry them for several weeks, freeze them again to remove contaminants, thaw them again, and then place them in a dermestid beetle colony maintained by the University’s college of natural resources. At the end, we’ll be left with the complete skeleton of a newborn bovid, stone tool cutmarks and all.

It’s a long process, but ultimately the type of work that’s fundamental to building a robust faunal comparative collection, and by extension archaeological knowledge. The Deniz calf whose life ended unexpectedly shortly after birth will live on in the University’s repository, a data point in dozens of studies down the line. And yes, although we’re collecting specific bones for a specific scientific purpose, we all agree in the end that bones are indeed pretty neat.