The Use of Trypsin to Prepare Skeletal Material for Comparative Collections with a Focus on Fish

Abstract

There are skeletal collections in museums and universities throughout the world that are not useful to the zooarchaeologist because they have not been properly cleaned–often the result of having been processed in the field. In this paper, a method to clean the bones of smaller animals is presented that is both quick and efficient with a minimum of special requirements. This method was designed to work under field conditions to create reference collections of local fauna. Three objectives were considered: a) preparing high quality skeletal material, b) minimizing the amount of specialized equipment needed to do so, and c) having a process easy to perform under non-laboratory conditions. The method developed involves maceration by the use of the enzyme proteinase trypsin. This form of maceration is easy to use and has given excellent results both in the laboratory and in the field. It has been used to prepare skeletons of small mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and especially fish.