As well as being useful, our possessions represent our extended selves. They provide a sense of past and tell us “who we are, where we have come from and perhaps where we are going”, says Russell Belk, who studies consumerism at York University in Toronto, Canada
The preposition in question is "on", and its purpose is to show you where the dog chewed. You can remove the preposition to form the sentence "The brown dog chewed the rawhide bone." You can also rearrange it to find the preposition, "on the rawhide bone, the dog chewed" in what is commonly known as the Yoda technique.