Saving Old Bones: a non-destructive method for bone collagen prescreening

Bone collagen is an important material for radiocarbon, paleodietary, and paleoproteomic analyses, but it degrades over time. Various methods have been employed to prescreen bone for collagen preservation, but these are often destructive and/or require exportation for analysis. Here we show that near-infrared spectroscopy can be used to determine bone collagen content quickly and non-destructively on site.r