1. Introduction

Zooarchaeologists often wish to display data from faunal assemblages on an idealised animal skeleton, with individual elements or element portions coloured or shaded as appropriate. Whether the data relate to skeletal part frequency, the location of butchery marks or taphonomic variables, presentation in anatomical form is both easier to interpret and visually more attractive than simple charts or tables of results. Producing such anatomical diagrams can be very time-consuming, however, limiting the practicality of their use beyond the most obvious and important data categories. If the process of displaying zooarchaeological data in anatomical form could be made faster and simpler, this would not only save a considerable amount of time for analysts, but would also encourage them to explore possible patterns in data categories that might not otherwise be considered in any detail. A major step in this direction occurred with the publication by J.H. Yvinec et al. (2007) of a corpus of skeletal templates in Adobe Illustrator format. Including many of the most common mammalian and avian species found on archaeological sites, these templates render each skeletal element as a separate object, allowing the user to colour, shade, or omit each bone as desired. This is an efficient way of producing high-quality diagrams for presentation or publication, but is still rather too time-consuming to be useful for rapid exploration and comparison of taphonomic and/or context-specific data on a large scale. The current article presents a new method of data display that solves this problem by using GIS software to link data directly into skeletal templates. In this approach the template is analogous to a map or site plan, with individual elements — or portions thereof — treated as separate features. The 'symbology' options within a GIS software package (in this case Esri ArcGIS) can be used to display values from an associated data table on these features in a wide variety of ways.

Previous anatomical applications of GIS tools within zooarchaeology have operated at the element level (e.g. Izeta 2007). Marean et al. (2001) demonstrate a method for recording the extent of each preserved fragment in order to calculate minimum numbers of elements, while Abe et al. (2002) apply the same GIS-based image analysis technique to the assessment of cut-mark locations.

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