ABSTRACT
In attempting to understand the burial and postmortem process, taphonomists can be seen to have adopted two complementary lines of approach (Quinney 2000): (1) neotaphonomy or actualistic taphonomy, which concentrates on the modern environment and applies its results to the past by analogy, and (2) paleotaphonomy, which examines the context and content of depositional sites in great detail using temporospatial patterning, skeletal part representation, and the pattern of skeletal damage as a means of interpreting formation processes. †e former analogous approach can be seen as primarily hypothetico-deductive in nature, while the latter can be inductive, deductive, or a combination of both. Forensic taphonomic research or reporting can fall into either category; in the main, experimental approaches can be considered neotaphonomic, while much of the case-based singlestudy reports can be considered paleotaphonomic in nature. However, the scienti˜c validity of what was (and indeed still is) a largely anecdotal, casebased literature, su•ers from limitations in application above and beyond the site-speci˜c conditions of the original study. One of the reasons for this may be that while other branches of the historical sciences have attempted to produce middle-or high-level taphonomic models that aim to construct overarching laws of burial, forensic taphonomic research has primarily been empirical in nature, with the production of low-level rather than high-level theoretical output. †e distinction is important and has profound implications for the applicability of much of the forensic taphonomic literature.
