Unique marine taphonomy in human skeletal material recovered from the medieval warship Mary Rose

The effect of skeletal exposure in a marine environment is an area of taphonomy that has been little investigated at the microscopic level. Understanding the peri‐mortem and subsequent post mortem history of deposition and/or redeposition is extremely important for event reconstruction and to identify deliberate or accidental redeposition. The material used for this study comes primarily from the Mary Rose shipwreck (a marine mass fatality dated AD 1545), and forensic material recovered from marine, lacustrine and terrestrial contexts is retrospectively referenced. Work presented here outlines a definitive type of marine exposure seen in temperate shallow off‐shore and intertidal marine contexts, and illustrates how it may be differentially identified from terrestrial deposition and exposure. Furthermore, the effects of rapid deposition on skeletal remains have been documented, and results indicate that marine organism fouling activity can be fully inhibited by rapid deposition of sediment. The responsible organism itself remains unidentified, but produces tunnels which are peripheral in their distribution and maintain fixed dimensions and morphology and are here associated with marine exposure. This type of microstructural change is unique and is not found in terrestrial or freshwater contexts. The study demonstrates a taphonomic microstructural change to bone and teeth which may be identified microscopically and interpreted as evidence of marine exposure. Secondarily, the history of depositional exposure between the two main Tudor layers has provided a new level of detail concerning exposure and site formation processes. The earliest Tudor layer formed rapidly over a period of months and contained no evidence of microstructural tunnelling, whereas microstructural tunnelling was seen exclusively in the second Tudor layer, formed over a period of decades, a period during which the ship's hull collapsed and a more open marine environment dominated. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.