Alba Regia. Annales Musei Stephani Regis. – Alba Regia. Az István Király Múzeum Évkönyve. 21. 1981 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: C sorozat (1984)

Közlemények – Mitteilungen - Bartosiewicz László: Csabdi–Télizöldes: Taphonomy in the Western Section of the Neolithic Site. p. 235–240.

KÖZLEMÉNYEK—MITTEILUNGEN Alba Regia, XXI, 1984 L. BARTOSIEWICZ CSABDI-TÉLIZÖLDES: TAPHONOMY IN THE WESTERN SECTION OF THE NEOLITHIC SITE Introduction The late Neolithic settlement at Csabdi

—Télizöldes represents an early phase of the Lengyel culture which spread over the western half of what is now modern Hungary between approximately 2800 and 2500 В. C. The type site of this culture was discovered in the southern part of central Transdanubia at the end of the last century (Wosinszky 1883, 1886). The site of Csabdi

—Télizöldes is located on rolling hillsdies of Gerecse mountain at an altitude of above 150 m (Antoni 1982) and appears to be composed of overlapping habitation areas which are largely contemporaneous with each other. They extend along both sides of the border between Fejér and Komárom counties. Since 1978, extensive field work has been carried out at this site and excavations have covered more than 5000 m* in Fejér county. The project was directed by J. Antoni of the Székesfehérvár King Stephen Museum. Faunal remains indicate that hunting and animal keeping were equally important sources of animal protein. Although the area was probably wet and forested four thousand years ago, the evidence for exploitation of aquatic species (fish an molluscs) is not sufficient to establish the role of such techniques in the subsistence economy. Because the detailed archaeozoological evaluation of bone remains from this site is to be published in the form of a site report, this paper will focus attention on taphonomic aspects of the material. Thus, even the partial site recovery offered a perfect analytical sample for preliminary studies. More reliable economic conclusions will be drawn when a larger sample of animal bones is evaluated. Hypothesis and Test Implications The survival and preservation of artifacts along with basic distribution patterns should be of much interest to archaeological work. Only the material brought to light during excavations offers a foothold for the prehistoric archaeologist. Taphonomy, as introduced by Efremov (1940) seeks to answer what changes may be expected in the faunal material between deposition and recovery : here the emphasis is laid on the interpretation of recovery patterns indicative of certain postmortem events affecting animal remains, including cultural factors. In order to present the problem in this paper a simplified model has been developed. Figure 1 shows the theoretical relationship between the number of bone specimens (x) and number of skeletal elements (y) retrieved when the complete skeleton of a single mammal is excavated. Although the number of skeletal elements to some extent should proportionally increase with the number of bones found, this linear relationship is ab ovo distorted by the differential probability of recovery for each bone, caused by the different number of elements in the skeleton. Under practical circumstances various factors may exacerbate this initial distorsion : 1 Skeletons from the same species may be mixed and thus overlap. 2 Identification and separation of species are often made impossible because of intensive and differential fragmentation. 3 The content of samples may be biased by excavation techniques. 4 In archaeology a special bias is introduced by partial representation caused by cultural factors. In spite of these reservations deviations from the normal skeletal assemblage are usually interpreted as resulting from cultural sources (4) i. e. behavioral patterns of the prehistoric population. There is no doubt, that activities such as primary and secondary butchering have a decisive impact on what kind of bone is deposited. However, there may always be a marginal group of skeletal parts which is suspiciously under-represented or entirely missing. Table 1 was compiled to illustrate such variability. Von den Driesch (1976) published the expected frequency of certain measurable bones at archaeological sites. Although her list serves a different purpose, her generalized empirical data very well demonstrate the likelyhood of differential recovery when compared to the original frequencies of elements in the skeleton. In the light of this reasoning it was hypothesized that there may be a significant difference between faunal material gathered in excavation units and the animal bones found in the original features at Csabdi

—Télizöldes. On the other hand, the null hypothesis represents the possibility, that various kinds of bones were evenly scattered all over the site, even if the spatial distribution of animal remains naturally indicates a greater density of bone deposition in features. Both alternatives were tested by comparing mean values and variances for the two groups of proveniences, as well as a detailed analysis of correlations between the variables. Due to the relatively small sample size p * 0.02 significance was required in all calculations. 235