Early human archaeological and fossil sites are known in Africa from about 6 million years ago, and in Asia from about 1.8 million years ago. The distribution of these sites in time and space is very patchy, and while this situation may in part be the result of the practical difficulties of working in these regions, it is also likely that given the variables of geomorphology, climate and vegetation, sites in which hominin, faunal, archaeological or environmental information is preserved may not be distributed uniformly across the landscape. The overall aim of this project, therefore, was to formulate a method of predicting where palaeolithic archaeological sites with organic material might be located.

One of the main factors that affects the global distribution of fossil remains is taphonomy, but taphonomic processes may themselves be overprinted by collagen degradation as the tensile strength of bone diminishes with the loss of nitrogen, a proxy for the main bone protein, collagen. As collagen is lost, this reduces the ability of bone to resist tensile stress. The rate of collagen loss is highly temperature sensitive and the rate increases exponentially. Temperature will therefore have a marked impact on collagen loss. If collagen loss materially influences the physical properties of the bone, then temperature may have a dominant role to play in bone taphonomy. Hence, it would be expected that fossil faunal remains would be distributed in areas of low collagen loss, i.e. low temperature. Conversely, lithics will not be subject to a temperature bias in their preservation. We tested this hypothesis through the use of archaeological material.

A database of sites from Africa and Asia dating to between 6 million and 10,000 years ago was collected. The data were georeferenced through the use of geographical co-ordinates (latitude/longitude). The dataset was used to assess the relationship between bone collagen preservation and the location of archaeological sites within Africa and Asia. The results and conclusions are published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The GIS software used was ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.) ArcView GIS v3.1 incorporating the Spatial Analyst v1.1 extension.