Abstract

Although Lewis Binford's concept of food utility has been widely cited, applied, and critiqued by zooarchaeologists, a number of related procedures outlined in Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology remain poorly understood and underutilised. One such concept is the Drying Utility Index, which predicts which carcass portions, with attached bone, will be selected for storage by drying. This index is potentially important, relating as it does to many key issues in hunter-gatherer and pastoralist archaeology, including subsistence, mobility patterns, storage, and seasonality. However, the Drying Utility Index has not been widely used by zooarchaeologists, at least in part because the calculations involved in its derivation are extremely complex. The primary purpose of this paper, therefore, is to present a new drying index which is significantly easier to calculate than Binford's, yet which retains all of its key attributes. This new index is then applied to caribou bone samples from two regions: Binford's Nunamiut data from northern Alaska, and the contents of three caches from the Barren Grounds of Canada, near Baker Lake, Nunavut. In both cases, the new index predicts the observed element frequencies as well as, or better than, the original drying index. As a result, the new index should prove applicable to element distributions from a wide range of archaeological contexts.