The impact of flake tool attributes and butcher experience on carcass processing time and efficiency during experimental butchery trials

Abstract

Butchery involves using tools to process animal carcasses during consumption of tissue packages, and this technological adaptation has a deep connection with evolving human dietary ecology. Studying butchery informs archaeological inferences about lithic artifact function and site formation and describes skeletal traces of carcass consumption, which may corroborate the butchery function of certain tools. Diverse methodologies including subjective personal observations and well‐controlled experiments that investigate abstracted slicing mechanics or realistic butchery scenarios provide mixed conclusions about which kinds of tools are more efficient for butchery and whether their archaeological traces can be discriminated. Much less analytical attention is devoted to investigating whether a butcher's experience using stone tools to process carcasses impacts their performance, which may confound experimental assessment of how tool attributes are related to butchery efficiency. These experiments examine butchery performance in two novices over 40 goat forelimb and hindlimb trials where a single flake was used to deflesh and disarticulate a limb. By measuring butchery performance as defleshing efficiency (the amount of meat removed per second) and the time necessary to disarticulate limb elements, we demonstrate that in general, both butchers performed similarly when butchering forelimbs and hindlimbs and did not exhibit a strong learning curve of performance improvement. As well, flake weight, size, and cutting‐edge length were positively related to defleshing efficiency and negatively related to disarticulation time, suggesting that larger flakes are better butchery tools. Our results suggest that anatomical differences between forelimbs and hindlimbs did not impact butchery timing or efficiency and butchery performance is similar across novices. To maximize comparability of experimental butchery results, we encourage future research to examine butchery performance with respect to animals or tissue package size and investigate how butcher experience impacts performance.

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