Author: C. Funk | UB Rats Project Lab | May 29

Our bins of unsorted midden and unanalyzed bird bones are emptier every day as we work through our sorting and analyses. Darren Poltorak just spent three months sorting 1/4″ screen bulk samples  – we sent the fish he sorted to Megan Partlow of Central Washington University for analysis. Her data will be posted on our results page soon.

I’m weighing, counting, and measuring the shellfish from the bulks Darren sorted. Soon Josh Howard will be sorting the 1/8″ screen bulk samples. He’ll be measuring many sea urchin mouth elements so that we can look for changes in sea urchin body size over the more than 2,000 years people harvested them from the Corvie Bay intertidal zone. Ariel Taivalkoski and I are working to identify our more than 5,000 bird bones. So far she (with a little help from me!) has identified 1,700 bones to avian family. We are seeing interesting shifts in the types of birds present over time and in differentl behavioral contexts.