I saw a link on one of the Facebook Anglo-Saxon groups to Matilda Holmes 2011 thesis "Food, Status and Complexity in Saxon and Scandinavian England: An Archaeozoological Approach". I've been reading it tonight and it's fascinating. One aspect of the research is seeing where the various cultures predominated geographically by analyzing the proportion of various meat animal bones in relation to each other-- the Vikings' fondness for cattle shows up in the geographic regions of the Danelaw, for example. If I wanted to set a feast in a particular time and place in England, I could use data from this thesis to make some educated guesses about what meats would be served.
Another aspect is seeing where trade and supply networks emerged, as seen by the bone records. Some affluent and urban areas have subsets of animal bones, showing that they were acquiring joints of meat rather than being a place where whole animals were butchered.
Holmes looks at the sizes of the livestock and sees that the larger, improved breeds largely shrank back to wild-like sizes after the Roman withdrawal. Larger sheep were replaced by smaller ones closer in size to the wild Soay sheep that are the domesticated sheep ancestor. Similar changes happened with cattle and swine. So much interesting stuff in this thesis!
Her research on ResearchGate (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matilda-Holmes/research) offers a lot of interesting potential. along these lines and others. Identifying draught cattle and the gradual switch in some places from plowing with cattle to plowing with horses-- the work makes changes in the bones that you can see in the remains. There are several papers about agriculture and foodways, which would be of interest to culinary types as well, such as Feeding Anglo-Saxon England: The bioarchaeology of an agricultural revolution.
So many interesting rabbits in this hole!!
No comments:
Post a Comment