Animal husbandry across the Western Roman Empire: Changes and continuities

This special issue of the European Journal of Archaeology discusses aspects of animal husbandry in a number of provinces of the Western Roman Empire. In this introduction, we describe the general characteristics of animal husbandry in pre-Roman and Roman times to assess any changes that may have occurred after the Roman conquest. The results suggest that the territoriality typifying the first millennium BC had a significant impact on production, resulting in a decrease in cattle size and frequencies across Europe. Nevertheless, not all the regions reacted in the same way, and regional communities that focused their animal production on pigs implemented more sustainable husbandry practices over time. By bringing together studies carried out across Europe, this paper highlights the existence of cases of both change and continuity across the Empire, and the (uneven) impact of the market economy on animal husbandry and dietary practices in climatically different regions

Defining bone movement in archaeological stratigraphy: a plea for clarity

In this paper, a terminology for the description of the movement of animal bone in archaeological stratigraphy is proposed and discussed. It is suggested that the terms ‘redeposition’ and ‘residuality’ are adopted to describe movement of bone from earlier to later levels, and ‘intrusion’ and ‘contamination’ to describe movement from later to earlier levels. While re-deposition and intrusion generically indicate movement of bones between different places and layers, residuality and contamination more specifically imply that the bones were found in a phase that was different from the one they were originally deposited in. Consequently, while redeposition and intrusion describe actual physical events, residuality and contamination represent analytical constructs, entirely dependent on the way archaeological phasing is designed. It is suggested that, whether such terminology is adopted or not, zooarchaeologists should be more explicit about the meaning of the concepts they use to describe animal bone movement and that they also make them as relevant as possible to broader archaeological concerns, rather than merely borrowing from the palaeontological tradition