Artiodactyl bones are the most common faunal remains found in Washington prehistoric archaeology sites, but they are often too fragmented to accurately identify a family, genus, or species. Traditional faunal analysis can only organize unidentifiable bone fragments into size class, and chemical methods often require the destruction of bone samples. In this thesis research, I tested a new, nondestructive faunal analysis technique using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) to measure trace element concentrations in comparative collection and archaeological bone samples. Using cannonbones from five different artiodactyl species, I collected trace element data from 50 comparative collection specimens and 18 archaeological specimens previously identified to species. I used a Random Forest classification analysis to predict the family and species of modern comparative and archaeological specimens based on collected trace element data. Species identification accuracy was 70% for modern specimens and 22% for archaeological specimens, while family identification accuracy was 82% for modern specimens and 67% for archaeological specimens. These results suggest that identification pXRF method used in this thesis is promising, but would require further work to be definitive
