Culling profiles: the indeterminacy of archaeozoological data to survivorship curve modelling of sheep and goat herd maintenance strategies

The comparison of survivorship curves derived from seven different models aiming to reconstruct ancient sheep and goat herd maintenance strategies (e.g. optimization of wool, meat, and milk production) shows that many of these models cannot be distinguished statistically. This observation renders the current theoretical framework for reconstructing ancient herd maintenance strategies problematic, due to the possible indeterminacy of model data analysis. In order to assign empirically observed age-at-death data to a model of herd maintenance strategy, it is suggested that a direct fit of observed data to survivorship curves be forgone in favor of a binning procedure highlighting the differences between fewer and more distinguishable models. The incorporation of high-resolution sexing and taxonomic determination to coarse-grained age-at-death models may go a long way towards solving the current problem of indeterminacy. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.