Caprine husbandry at the Iron Age settlement of A Lanzada (Pontevedra, Spain)
Bad preservation has greatly hampered archaeozoological research in the north-western region of the Iberian Peninsula. This has limited the size of samples and the specific identification of the bone remains, preventing a better understanding of livestock production and husbandry strategies. With th...
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| Formato: | otro |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:digital.csic.es:10261/307929 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/307929 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Sheep Goats Management Metrical data Iron Age North-western Iberia |
| Resumo: | Bad preservation has greatly hampered archaeozoological research in the north-western region of the Iberian Peninsula. This has limited the size of samples and the specific identification of the bone remains, preventing a better understanding of livestock production and husbandry strategies. With the aim to partially fill this gap, the present paper focuses on the study of the Late Iron Age caprine remains recovered at the coastal site of A Lanzada (Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain). The location of this settlement on seashore sandy sediments has favoured the conservation of a large faunal assemblage dominated by the main domesticates. Morphological and metrical determination of caprine teeth and bones has enabled to estimate sheep to goat ratios, to build age-at-death profiles for each species and in the case of goats, to recognise female and male specimens. The large proportion of immature and sub-adult animals suggests a balanced relationship between optimisation of production and herd security, as it would be expected in a self-sufficient economy. Most interesting are the osteometric trends observed for sheep and goats. While sheep evidence a large decrease in size with respect to other northern Iberian sites dated from the Neolithic to medieval times, goats appear to have undergone little variation in the course of time. Therefore, caprines biometric change cannot be related exclusively to environmental factors but rather to different feeding and husbandry strategies that need to be further researched. |
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