Abstract
It has long been recognised that the proportions of Neolithic domestic animal species—cattle, pig and sheep/goat—vary from region to region, but it has hitherto been unclear how much this variability is related to cultural practices or to environmental constraints. This study uses hundreds of faunal assemblages from across Neolithic Europe to reveal the distribution of animal use between north and south, east and west. The remarkable results present us with a geography of Neolithic animal society—from the rabbit-loving Mediterranean to the beef-eaters of the north and west. They also demonstrate that the choices made by early Neolithic herders were largely determined by their environments. Cultural links appear to have played only a minor role in the species composition of early Neolithic animal societies.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1046-1059 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Antiquity |
| Volume | 87 |
| Issue number | 338 |
| Early online date | 22 Nov 2013 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2013 |
Bibliographical note
We thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for funding the Origin and Spread of Stockkeeping (OSSK) project and the European Research Council for its grant to the project ‘EUROEVOL: Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe’ for making possible the continued analysis of the OSSK data in the framework of the new project. We are grateful to Pascale Gerbault and Adrian Timpson for their comments on the statistical methods and to Elisabeth Llado for her work on the Spanish data.Keywords
- Europe
- Neolithic
- zooarchaeology
- herding strategies
- food production systems
