Adventures in Zooarchaeology

So for the last few weeks I've been spending my Fridays boiling and attempting to slowly deflesh a Western Fox Squirrel, which isn't native to the area but is basically standing in as a "practice animal" for building a zooarchaeological type collection (or rather, as "this is what we could scrape up on short notice").  What this is is a collection of boxed disarticulated bones from different animal species with the individual bone types identified (e.g. "femur", "tibia", "mandible") so that they can be compared to bones collected in archaeological settings.  This is primarily used for faunal analysis, the determination of what animal species the people living there were eating/using, but it can also be useful for identifying the species source for worked bone artifacts.

So far I have realized a few things:

1. Skinning and gutting the animal before you boil it is probably important, because boiled squirrel skin is like trying to cut a goddamn bulletproof vest and the  animal smells infinitely better once the guts have been chucked.

2. Oh yeah, we should've taken the brain out first.

3. Defrosting it before steps 2 and 3 and definitely before hucking it in the boiling pot would also have been a plus, but we forgot about that part.  Oops.

4. God damn, this looks and smells like dark meat chicken.  I'm sitting here stripping the flesh from a squirrel foreleg and salivating.

5. One of the people I am working with kept the eyes for her collection, which she apparently stores in her mother's freezer.  She also kept the tongue since it came out in one piece.  I stopped asking after that.  Still, she did an awesome job on stripping the head.

6. DAMMIT IT SMELLS LIKE CHICKEN AND THE TENDONS LOOK LIKE RICE NOODLES I really need to eat lunch or something before this lab.  I am also now desperate for pancit.

7. Tart would prefer I not point out both of these facts while making the little forepaw wave "hello" at him.

8. Tart would also prefer I not show him the penis I severed off the animal while attempting to get at the hipbones (even if it is surprisingly long after you've eviscerated the animal and removed the internal sections of it).

9. Squirrels apparently do not have separate kneecaps, thankfully, because this was the point when I'd cleared the leg and was frantically digging in the meatpile for a wandering patella.

10. This entire class is girls, including the teacher.  This puzzles me slightly and worries Tart greatly.

Still, we're working on building up a reference collection of animal bones to use to identify the faunal remains of local animals and apparently we've now got a good source of marine mammals, so potentially in the near future we'll be working on harbor and elephant seal.

We're burying those damn things though, because there is no way in hell they're going to fit in the pot.