EXPLORANDO LA VARIABILIDAD MéTRICA Y MORFOLóGICA DE ASTAS BOVINAS A PARTIR DE LA TéCNICA DEL ANáLISIS DE CONTORNOS

The present work explores the potentiality of EFA (“Elliptic Fourier Analysis”), an analytic and descriptive tool for the study of shape, independently of the size of the artifacts, to the study of horns. Morphospace of a little sample of twenty-two bovine horns are thus examined using EFA method combined with image analysis techniques. The different shape dimensions obtained as a result of the application of this procedure can be simplified by means of principal component analysis, in order to obtain new variables that capture the greater possible variation in the analyzed sample. The shape variables obtained in this manner, can be utilized as independent variables in different statistical analysis. This high-performance method seems to be an appropiate morphometric technique for distinguishing the complex horn shapes both in extinguished as extant bovines .