Understanding the ontogenetic age and sex composition of zooarchaeological assemblages can reveal details about past human hunting and herding strategies as well as past animal morphology and behavior. As such, the accuracy of our estimates underlies our ability to ascertain details about site formation and gain insights into how people interacted with different animals in the past. Unfortunately, our estimates typically rely on only a small number of bones, limiting our ability to fruitfully use these estimates to make meaningful comparisons to theoretical expectations or even between multiple assemblages. This paper describes a method to use zooarchaeological remains with standard biometric measurements to estimate the ontogenetic age and sex composition of the assemblage, focused on immature, adult-sized female, and adult-sized male specimens. The model uses a Bayesian framework to ensure that the parameter estimates are biologically meaningful. Simulated assemblages show that the model can accurately estimate the biometry and composition of zooarchaeological assemblages. Two archaeological case studies also show how the model can be applied to produce tangible insights. The first, focused on sheep from Neolithic Pinarbaşı B, highlights the model’s ability to elucidate site formation and function. The second, focused on cattle remains from four assemblages from 7th-6th millennium BCE northwestern Anatolia, showcases how to use the mixture modeling results to compare assemblages to one another and to specific hypotheses. This modeling framework provides a new avenue for investigating long-term trajectories in animal biometry alongside contextual analyses of past human choices in butchery and consumption.

了解动物考古组合的个体发生年龄和性别组成可以揭示有关过去人类狩猎和放牧策略以及过去动物形态和行为的细节。因此，我们估计的准确性是我们确定遗址形成细节并深入了解过去人们如何与不同动物互动的能力的基础。不幸的是，我们的估计通常仅依赖于少量的骨骼，这限制了我们有效地使用这些估计来与理论预期甚至多个组合之间进行有意义的比较的能力。本文描述了一种使用动物考古遗骸和标准生物测量来估计组合的个体发育年龄和性别组成的方法，重点关注未成熟的成年雌性和成年雄性标本。该模型使用贝叶斯框架来确保参数估计具有生物学意义。模拟组合表明，该模型可以准确估计动物考古组合的生物特征和组成。两个考古案例研究还展示了如何应用该模型来产生切实的见解。第一个重点关注新石器时代 Pinarbaşı B 的羊，强调了该模型阐明遗址形成和功能的能力。第二个重点关注公元前 7 世纪至 6 世纪安纳托利亚西北部的四个组合的牛遗骸，展示了如何使用混合建模结果将组合相互比较以及与特定假设进行比较。该建模框架为研究动物生物统计的长期轨迹以及对过去人类屠宰和消费选择的背景分析提供了新途径。