and red fox (Vulpes vulpes): the large dog present in the assmblage may in fact represent wolf (Canis lupus). Two skeletal elements of brown bear (Ursus arctos) have been recovered from different parts of the cave.
Table 2: Vertebrate Fauna Recovered from Carsington Pasture Cave.
The faunal remains show few signs of butchery or other processes of food preparation or secondary product utilisation. There is copious evidence of gnawing by medium sized carnivores, with splintering of long bone shafts and puncture marks on the epiphyses and other regions of fragile bone. There are also two instances of an unusual pattern of incisor "chiselling" caused by a large rodent. Among the pig remains there are several long bone elements that appear to be left and right antimeres from the same individual, suggesting that whole carcasses rather than individual skeletal elements were entering the cave system. This hypothesis is supported by the low frequency of butchery on the bones of this species: just 2 out of 139 pig bones exhibit cut marks. We infer that the pigs may have fallen into the cave through vertical fissures, or have been brought in by carnivores as partial or complete carcasses.
The microfaunal remains sampled from surface locations in the second chamber have been the subject of a preliminary study by James Williams. The microfaunal concentrations are dominated by the remains of water vole (Arvicola terrestris) and field vole (Microtus agrestis), and are likely to have accumulated from the pellets regurgitated by owls that at some time utilised the chamber for roosting or nesting.
A decorative bone pin, a fragment of worked antler and a flint flake were discovered during excavation of the floor of the second chamber in order to gain access to deeper sections of the cave system. The complete perforated bone pin (Figure 5 ), made on a split roe deer metatarsal, is 148 mm long and is 15 mm wide at the flattened proximal end, tapering distally to a finely worked point with a cylindrical cross section. The proximal end incorporates a smooth unmodified portion of the articular surface of the metatarsal. The drilled perforation is 2 mm in diameter and is positioned 10 mm from the proximal end. The pin appears to have been crafted using stone tools, and it is comparable with similar artefacts found in Bronze Age burial mounds in Derbyshire and in East Yorkshire. The flint artefact is a cortical flake on translucent grey flint exhibiting a clear striking platform and a bulb of percussion. The dimensions of the flake are 34mm from striking platform to distal end, 23mm maximum breadth and 4mm maximum thickness.
Figure 5: Bone pin recovered from deposits in floor of 2nd Chamber
The worked antler (Figure 6 ) is the basal 150 mm of the beam of a naturally shed left side adult red deer antler with part of the brow tine and an incipient bez tine. The artefact has three deep parallel grooves characteristic of the ‘groove and splinter’ method of antler-working as described and illustrated by Clark & Thompson (1953). In this technique, longitudinal blanks with a triangular cross section are prepared using a sharp stone instrument to score parallel V-sectioned grooves through the hard outer wall of the antler. The grooves are positioned so as to follow the natural longitudinal furrows in the surface of the antler, and often three or four separate splinters were cut from a single antler beam. The specimen from Carsington Pasture Cave is broken distally, but a length of about 100 mm of the grooves is preserved including their shallow terminations close to the base of the antler. Two of the grooves penetrate almost as far as the medullary cavity of the antler, and the preparation of the splinter must therefore have been near completion. The edges of these grooves are contiguous and define a splinter with a steep triangular cross-section that is about 8 mm broad on its interior margin. The third groove is positioned on the posterior surface of the antler about 15 mm from the nearer of the two completed grooves. The third groove is about 3 mm dee