ASSESSMENT OF BIODIVERSITY IN PLEISTOCENE BRITAIN THROUGH COMPREHENSIVE SMALL-SCALE MICROSAMPLING OF VERTEBRATE FOSSIL REMAINS

Biodiversity in the recent past has been increasingly affected by the replacement of natural ecosystems with human-dominated ones. In order to better understand past biodiversity and the impact of factors such as climate change, this project aims to provide a small-scale microsampling technique for the thorough identification of fragmented vertebrate remains that could be applied to all future archaeological and palaeontological cave deposits. This project will focus on a single archaeologically-important site, Pin Hole Cave, Creswell Crags, Derbyshire spanning ~40,000 years of human and animal occupation. This is the ideal site for this project because it has had a recent (1980s) highly-detailed small-scale excavation and a previous (1920s) full-scale excavation and is now used as the type-site for Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3 fauna. The detailed 1980s excavations at Pin Hole Cave, where approximately 18,500 bone finds were spatially-mapped, will be used to assess whether core sampling of archaeological deposits can yield information equivalent to full-scale excavation and, if so, the typical size, number and distribution of core samples necessary to obtain this information. This will ultimately offer a small-scale microsampling technique that could be used on forthcoming site excavations to investigate the biodiversity of Pleistocene Britain with minimal site destruction. To do this I propose to digitise the spatially-mapped finds and then identify all morphologically-unidentifiable bone fragments from 50% of the deposits (~7,500-15,000 bone fragments) from the recent small-scale excavations at Pin Hole Cave. The sampling will be carried out in such a way as to investigate increasingly large sections of deposit and the species information that each section contains. These will be compared directly to the species information obtained from the earlier full-scale excavation to evaluate the potential of small-scale excavations that are comprehensively analysed. Reducing the need for full-scale excavation would minimise site destruction and allow for better preservation of cave assemblages for future research. Such a project has not been possible until the recent introduction of mass spectrometry to sequencing ancient proteins such as collagen. Following the analyses of the Pin Hole Cave material, although this species-specific biomolecule can be routinely extracted from British Middle Pleistocene bone analysis of selected specimens from various British sites from 10,000 to ~1,000,000 years in age will be carried out to confirm the application of the proposed techique to other archaeological sites.