Just realized the bone fragments at my local dig site in Ohio probably aren't ritual objects at all
I was at a talk in Columbus 3 weeks ago and an archaeologist mentioned that 40 percent of the small animal bones found at that Hopewell site near Chillicothe show gnaw marks from rodents. Everyone in the audience kept nodding about ceremonial use but I just sat there thinking, maybe these are just leftovers from regular meals that got scavenged. Are we too quick to label every odd deposit as ritual when plain old taphonomy might explain it better?