The upper cave.Taphonomic analysis of the treatment of the dead

Archaeologists have been thinking about the taphonomy of human skeletons for at least a hundred years but most interpretations were based on the common sense or anecdotal observations. There is less contention surrounding such observations when a skeleton represents the mains of a largely complete, undisturbed body; departures from this assumed norm have usually simply been dismissed as meaningless disturbances or ascribed to some simple, generic, and usually ungrounded cause such as "excarnation" or "cannibalism". It is only in the last two decades that anthropologists and archaeologists have realised that by closely observing a wide range of taphonomic indicators, one can make reliably founded inferences about how a deposti of human bones had ben created and altered.