期刊名称：Bulletin of the International Association for Paleodontology
电子版ISSN：1846-6273
出版年度：2012
卷号：6
期号：2
页码：51-69
出版社：International Association for Paleodontology
摘要：Human skeletal remains offers the most direct insight into the health, well-being, and the lifestyles of both past and modern populations, as well as the study of violence and traumas encountered both from archaeological and forensic contexts. They also allow archaeologists and anthropologists to reconstruction demographic details, none more so than those of children, where mortality rates were high in most human populations until the twentieth century. The study of children within biological anthropology had being taking place for many years now, but studies of mortality and morbidity are often hindered by the poor preservation of their skeletons or infrequent representation of skeletal elements. Taphonomic processes are often cited as the cause of this ‘under-representation’ of children from archaeological investigations. This phenomenon is thought to be as a result of the inability of non-adult bone to survive the changing conditions of the burial environment in which they are interred. Taphonomic factors can be divided into two types: intrinsic (resistance to bone) and extrinsic (environmental influences), both of which exert influence on the long term survival of non-adult bone. This paper aims to review the many intrinsic and extrinsic factors which can alter human bone and contribute to its deterioration in the burial environment in both archaeology and forensic science.
