Humans, mammals and ingenuity
Animals were food, co-workers and companions, and their remains served hugely practical and possibly ritual purposes, according to this valuable and – huzzah! – accessible academic handbook.
The Oxford Handbook of Zooarchaeology Hb, 839pp, illus, ISBN 978 019 968 6476 £110.00
Deliberately buried or scattered accidentally, animal remains can offer profound insights into our ancestors’ behaviours, lifestyles and beliefs. We interacted with a menagerie in numerous ritual, æsthetic and practical ways. Animals were food, workers (hunting dogs, for instance) and companions. Sometimes the same species was all three.
This important and accessible book shows, among many other themes, how zooarchæology – the study of animal remains – highlights our ancestors’ ingenuity. Molluscs and their shells, for example, have been used worldwide as food, bait, dye, medicines, containers, material for tools and adornment, a construction material and in pottery manufacture. Iron Age builders in northern Scotland used whale vertebræ as sockets for door posts and the skull from a sperm whale as a drain cover. In mediæval England, horn was “an important and versatile everyday material”.
If our ancestors could find a use for a part of an animal, they did. Catfish pectoral fins helped, for example, release points and tips stuck in the body. Vikings made trophies from walrus penis bones and chopping boards from whale vertebræ.
Otoliths (ear stones) offer a striking example of this. Otoliths are tiny lumps of calcium carbonate in the ear (including in humans) that are involved in hearing and sensing gravity. Paxton ( Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 2000; 355: 1299–303) reported that otoliths in 247 species of marine fish ranged from 0.4–31.4mm. Fishing cultures use otoliths and the tiny ear bones as medicines and in divination. Some wore pouches or necklaces of otoliths for their magical properties. Certain fishing communities in northeastern Brazil still make a tea from otoliths to treat kidney disease. Two pits from Brazil dating from about 3,000 years ago were too small to hold 150 fish heads, but contained 300 otoliths. These tiny objects were removed deliberately.
What some remains ‘mean’ is less clear, however. There isn’t, for example, necessarily a clear demarcation between the secular and the sacred. Using whale bone as a building material could have structural, ritual and symbolic significance – or pick any two or all three. The bones of horses from the Carpathian basin revealed that some had serious chronic illnesses, such as fused vertebræ, which meant they could not be ridden. The Carpathians’ care for the diseased animals underscores the close relationship and importance to their way of life in the fifth to ninth centuries. It’s a societal and personal relationship that most of us can scarcely imagine today.
Domestication is also more complex than it might appear. Sometimes domestication may have been pragmatic, such as turning to meat and animal products when cereals were limited. In many parts of the world, however, the elite perpetuated their socio-political dominance by community feasting. Animal sacrifices and elite grave goods, often representing animals, helped cement Neolithic power structures. So, domestication might also be a response to the demand for feasting and other rituals.
Indeed, in some cases, production of animistic ritual objects reached an industrial scale. The ancient Egyptian catacomb of Anubis at Saqqara contained 7.8 million canine mummies. The Ibis galleries contained at least four million mummies of these once sacred birds.
Our ancestors’ dynamic relationships with animals also helped drive technological advances. In what is now the Swiss Alps, Neolithic hunters killed red deer for food and for making tools such as sockets to fit wood handles to stone axes. But about 3700 BC, the number of antler artefacts declined markedly, probably following over-hunting. So the ancient Swiss developed ways of attaching the stone directly to the wood. Often these insights arose by looking at disarticulated skeletons (though zooarchæologists also examine hides, cartilage, DNA, shells and so on). If you’ve looked at a pile of bones in a museum or a biology lab, you’ll soon appreciate the often daunting task facing zooarchæologists in interpreting animal remains. Are the remains livestock, companions or commensals – animals that adopted the environment for the opportunities (such as modern urban foxes)?
For instance, there are five subspecies of the wildcat. Their skeletons are essentially indistinguishable from each other and from domestic cats (eurekalert.org/e/7rkw). Cats can be domesticated pest control, feral commensals, companions and even a source of food and pelts. Corvids (such as crows, ravens and rooks) may be commensals (they were designated pests in the 16th century Vermin Acts in England) but they make great pets; and to the ‘Celts’ (I know the term is controversial) symbolised death and battle. Often context is everything. Attitudes towards, and use of, cats often varied between mediæval towns, and between urban and rural areas. Yet this accessible guide shows how patience, collaboration and scientific rigour is beginning to unlock the secrets and stories in the bones.
The book’s historical and geographical range is remarkable from interrelationships between humans and mammals in Siberia to prehistoric fauna in New Zealand. Historically, the book runs from the Stone Age to mediæval England, which highlights the commonalities and differences. And you don’t need a degree in anatomy or archæology: the book is accessible and focuses on concepts and themes (rather than anatomical minutiæ), supported by extensive references that allow you to take matters further. The handbook proves that science written by academics doesn’t have to be dull and impenetrable to non- Continued on page 60
“In some cases, production of animistic ritual objects reached an industrial scale.”