Hi, it might be the maxilla of either fresh water fish or sea water fish

I am not at all an expert on Southamerican Fauna. but could those be humeri of penguins?

Hi Nadja, its not.  I had a quick look in our collection but they don't match the humeri of the penguins.  I will have a look at some of the other birds in our collection.

The shape looks like humeri to me, but they are very flat and tiny, 5 mm. And, there is no other bone to match them. So, I thought they are part of a regular structure, like the Aristotle's lantern (sea urchin), but they are not.

Baby sea turtle humeri.

The problem is the context: a cooking oven from 500 AD. There is no other part of the skeleton !

It is an Echinoderma, a starfish.

I think it is ambulacral ossicles (ventral part) from an Asteroidea.

I have an Oreasteridae Oreaster reticulatus from Guadeloupe (Caribbean) in my osteological collection from Antilles (see the picture).

In the Pacific coast, Hokker et al. (2005) mention two species from the same Family in Peru : Yuri Hooker, Francisco Solís-Marín, Miguel Lleellish, 2005. Equinodermos de las Islas Lobos de Afuera (Lambayeque, Perú), Rev. peru biol. v.12 n.1 Lima ene./jul. 2005.

  http://www.scielo.org.pe/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1727-99332005000100005

Thanks Sandrine ! Should be equinoderma.

Attached another kind of structure, more variable in shape but consistent with ossicles.

We do need a precise ID, and the most important question: what kind of edible equinoderma -besides sea urchin- to include in a cooking oven full of all kind of shellfish from rocky and sandy sustratum ? Any other reason to cook them ?

I just cooked, washed and dry up 2 species of local starfish. Mystery solved: all those strange archaeological bones came from our common starfish (Stichaster striatus). The skeleton includes many articulated parts with different shapes, an incredible architecture indeed !

perfect !!!  :))