Dead or alive?: investigating long-distance transport of live fallow deer and their body parts in antiquity

The extent to which breeding populations of fallow deer were established in Roman Europe has been obscured by the possibility that the skeletal remains of the species, in particular Dama foot bones and antlers, were traded over long distances as objects in their own right. This paper sets out to refine our understanding of the evidence for the transportation of living and dead fallow deer in Iron Age and Roman Europe. To achieve this, museum archives containing purportedly early examples of Dama antler were searched, with available specimens sampled for carbon, nitrogen and strontium isotope analyses, and compared with data for archaeological fallow deer from across Europe. Importantly, the resulting isotope values can be interpreted in light of new modern baseline data for fallow deer presented here. Together these multi-isotope results for modern and archaeological fallow deer provide a more critical perspective on the transportation of fallow deer and their body parts in antiquity

Imports and isotopes: a modern baseline study for interpreting Iron Age and Roman trade in fallow deer antlers

The European Fallow deer (Dama dama dama) became extinct in the British Isles and most of continental Europe at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, with the species becoming restricted to an Anatolian refugium (Masseti et al. 2008). Human-mediated reintroductions resulted in fallow populations in Rhodes, Sicily, Mallorca, Iberia and other parts of western Europe (Sykes et al. 2013). Eventually, the species was brought to Britain by the Romans during the 1st century AD, with a breeding population being established at Fishbourne Roman Palace (Sykes et al. 2011). The human influence on the present-day distribution of the species makes it particularly interesting from a zooarchaeological perspective. This paper describes my MSc research, as part of the AHRC-funded project Dama International: Fallow Deer and European Society 6000 BC–AD 1600, looking at antlers from Iron Age and Roman sites in Britain for evidence of trade in body parts and whether this can be elucidated by a parallel stable isotope study of modern fallow antlers of known provenance