The effects of collection strategy and effort on faunal recovery

Gerald Eck

Department of Anthropology - University of Washington

Abstract

Although preserved by sediments that were contemporaneously deposited by the same river and lake system and exposed in contiguous areas, the American and French collections of fossil specimens from the Shungura Formation of southwestern Ethiopia produce differences in specimen counts that are surprisingly large.  Some of these differences were caused by well documented differences in geography and geology of the formation and the history of the research efforts of the two expeditions.  Other differences apparently arose because of factors that are less well documented.  The talk briefly describes the well documented factors leading to differences in specimen counts, including differences in the sizes of areas explored, months of active field work, and numbers of sites excavated for the recovery of macro- and microfaunal remains.  Further, it proposes methods for discovering factors that are less well documented, likely related to differences in research strategies and the inherent richness of the sediments explored.  And finally, it suggests how the collections might be best used to avoid the effects of biases that they apparently contain.