The importance and challenges of refitting fragmented animal bones from archaeological sites

The analysis of animal bones extracted from archaeological sites is important for understanding how sites were formed and how early humans interacted with animals on the landscape. Oftentimes, bones are fragmented. One method for analyzing fragmentary bone is to put the fragments back together. This task is done manually which is daunting when working with large faunal assemblages comprised of thousands of bone fragments. Nonetheless, refitting is important and 3D imaging of bone fragments offers the opportunity to use powerful mathematical and computational tools to develop more efficient refitting methods. Fully leveraging these tools necessitates collaboration between mathematicians and anthropologists. The Anthropological and Mathematical Analysis of Archaeological and Zooarchaeological Evidence (AMAAZE) is a consortium that promotes such collaborations. Here, I will provide an overview of current AMAAZE projects, emphasizing our work on refitting. I will describe ways in which refitting is used to answer important anthropological questions and highlight some of the specific challenges we encounter when trying to reconstruct fragmented long bones.