Using ZooMS to assess archaeozoological insights and unravel human subsistence behaviour at La Viña rock shelter (northern Iberia)

Bones of recent mammals in the Amboseli Basin, southern Kenya, exhibit distinctive weathering characteristics that can be related to the time since death and to the local conditions of temperature, humidity and soil chemistry. A categorization of weathering characteristics into six stages, recognizable on descriptive criteria, provides a basis for investigation of weathering rates and processes. The time necessary to achieve each successive weathering stage has been calibrated using known-age carcasses. Most bones decompose beyond recognition in 10 to 15 yr. Bones of animals under 100 kg and juveniles appear to weather more rapidly than bones of large animals or adults. Small-scale rather than widespread environmental factors seem to have greatest influence on weathering characteristics and rates. Bone weathering is potentially valuable as evidence for the period of time represented in recent or fossil bone assemblages, including those on archeological sites, and may also be an important tool in censusing populations of animals in modern ecosystems.

MALDIquant is an R package providing a complete and modular analysis pipeline for quantitative analysis of mass spectrometry data. MALDIquant is specifically designed with application in clinical diagnostics in mind and implements sophisticated routines for importing raw data, preprocessing, non-linear peak alignment and calibration. It also handles technical replicates as well as spectra with unequal resolution. MALDIquant and its associated R packages readBrukerFlexData and readMzXmlData are freely available from the R archive CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org). The software is distributed under the GNU General Public License (version 3 or later) and is accompanied by example files and data. Additional documentation is available from http://strimmerlab.org/software/maldiquant/.