Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 26

Analysis of Animal Remains from the Old Fort Point Site, Northern Alberta

by Anne Meachem Rick

Methods

The abbreviation MNI is used throughout the text and tables for the minimum number of individuals represented by the faunal material using all possible information such as age, size and breakage pattern rather than solely from a numerical count of the most abundant element for each species. All bones from the site are treated as one assemblage for MNI calculations.

Following Chaplin (1971: 64-65), bone fragments which unite with other fragments are counted as separate fragments if they are separately identifiable; otherwise the pieces fitted together are counted as one.

Fish identification efforts centred on skull and girdle elements; no attempt was made to identify vertebrae, spines or pterygiophores although some of these potentially identifiable elements were present in the faunal material.

Unidentifiable bird bone has been divided into three classes based on size of animals from which the bones came and defined as follows: medium bird — from approximately crow size up to and including such forms as ducks, larger hawks and owls; large bird — geese, swans, cranes, eagles, etc.; medium to large bird — a category including bones which could belong to either medium or large birds but are too fragmentary to assign to either category.

Unidentifiable mammal bone has also been divided into three classes: medium mammal — from muskrat or cat size up to approximately fox size; large mammal — from the size of a large dog up through all larger mammals such as caribou, moose, bison and bear; medium to large mammal — bones which could belong to either medium or large mammals.

There were no bones attributable to small fish, birds or mammals except the one bone assigned to uncertain class; their absence in the material may be a function of excavation techniques rather than real absence from the site.

Bone identifications were made using comparative skeletons at the Zooarchaeological Identification Centre and from other collections in the National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa, as well as from the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Special collections of birds and fish from the Lake Athabaska-Fort Smith area were made by Dr. R.F. Coupland, then with the Canadian Wildlife Service, Fort Smith, to facilitate identification of the Old Fort Point bones; these specimens are now in the Zooarchaeological Identification Centre collection.

Both the animal bones and raw data from which this report was prepared have been deposited with the National Historic Parks and Sites Branch, Ottawa.