While the quest for understanding and even mimicking biological tissue haspropelled, over the last decades, more and more experimental activities at themicro and nanoscales, the appropriate evaluation and interpretation ofrespective test results has remained a formidable challenge. As a contributionto tackling this challenge, we here describe a new method for identifying, fromnanoindentation, the elasticity of the undamaged extracellular bone matrix. Theunderlying premise is that the tested bovine bone sample is either initiallydamaged (i.e. exhibits micro-cracks a priori) or that suchmicro-cracks are actually induced by the nanoindentation process itself, orboth. Then, (very many) indentations may relate to either an intact materialphase (which is located sufficiently far away from micro-cracks), or todifferently strongly damaged material phases. Corresponding elastic phaseproperties are identified from the statistical evaluation of the measuredindentation moduli, through representation of their histogram as a weighted sumof Gaussian distribution functions. The resulting undamaged elastic modulus ofbovine femoral extracellular bone matrix amounts to 31 GPa, a value agreeingstrikingly well both with direct quasi-static modulus tests performed onSEM-FIB-produced micro-pillars (Luczynski et al., 2015), and with thepredictions of a widely validated micromechanics model (Morin and Hellmich,2014). Further confidence is gained through observing typical indentationimprints under Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), which actually confirms theexistence of the two types of micro-cracks as described above.