METHOD OF SEPARATING OVIS ARIES PAIRED ASTRAGALUS IN CLOSED ARCHAEOLOGICAL COMPLEXES (USING THE EXAMPLE OF THE MEDIEVAL TREASURE OF ALCHIKS FROM THE TOROPOVO-7A IN THE KUZNETSK BASIN)
Abstract
The article examines a collection of dice, of 91 talus bones or astragalus from domestic sheep (Ovis aries), found during the excavations at the Toropovo-7A cult site in the valley of the Kasma river in the Kuznetsk basin. These archaeological objects were found in one cluster in the upper filling of the soil pit. The archaeological site according to analogies of the totality of finds was dated back to the 11th–14th centuries and attributed to the Shandin archaeological culture. The preliminary analysis of the astragalus collection from the Toropovo-7A cult site showed that it was formed by versatile bones, of which 44 were left and 47 were right, and on 20 bones there were traces of artificial damage. These data led to the question of the real number of sheep that could belong to the found alchiki, since their number could range from 47 to 91. To solve this problem, based on the approach of L. Lyman, a method was developed to identify versatile paired astragalas potentially belonging to one individual. It is based on the classification of bones by cluster analysis, taking into account morphometric differences between the left and right astragalus belonging to the reference individual. The Euclidean distance, calculated from two dimensions: the length of the astragalus along the lateral side and the width of its lower articular block, was used as a measure of distance in the construction of the similarity dendrogram by the arithmetic mean method.
As a threshold value, the level of association of reference astragalus served, below which versatile astragalus, united in separate clusters, were considered as potentially belonging to one species. As a result of cluster analysis, versatile pairs of astragalus were singled out from a sample of 75 samples, which hypothetically can belong to 9 animals. Taking into account the results obtained, it is assumed that the minimum number of rams whose astragalus appeared in the collection at Toropovo-7A was at least 80 species.
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