Mad Methodologies: July Thesis Update

Yes, that’s right: It’s the 10th of August. Despite that fact, dear readers, you’ll have to excuse my tardy thesis update for July on account of travel/busy work schedule/apathy.

Since the month of July has seen me almost entirely engrossed in the laboratory, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share just what it is that I do with my hours and hours alone in a room surrounded by human and animal bones. We’ll take a look at what my average ‘lab day’ looked like, what I was recording, and what I hope to be able to do with that data.

Most weekdays during July saw me getting up and lugging my computer, notebooks, and various archaeological reports and journal articles down the steep hills of Crookes towards the Department of Archaeology’s Northgate House. I’d been given a specific long lab bench in the osteology teaching laboratory for my work over the summer since I was meant to be sharing the room with a handful of human osteology and physical anthropology graduate students. However, it’s been just me for most of the summer. So, I can’t complain there. These benches have been covered in padded linoleum to help dampen the fall of any stray bones on the table, but I generally just drop bones on the floor anyway while feeling like I’m sorting piles of dirty toys on a kitchen floor. Archaeology is great if you like drawing with coloured pencils and digging in the dirt, incidentally.

My major professor/advisor is known for his zooarchaeological work through Iron Age, Saxon, and Medieval Britain – mostly with the development of pig domestication. Most recently, he’s been one of the primary researchers on the animal bones recovered from the large, National Geographic-sponsored Stonehenge Riverside Project. So, I’ve adopted his large database structure from that to use in recording my material. Archaeologically, you very rarely find a completely intact bone. I’ve been lucky enough to have seen some in my assemblage, but that’s because these particular cuts of cattle meat were just tossed into the moat 800 years ago and haven’t really been bothered since. Many factors influence what material finds its way to the archaeologist’s lab. These can include the slaughter and/or butchering of a particular animal, where those cuts of meat wound up, what happened to the parts no one chose to eat, how the bones were discarded, what’s happened to them since then, and how archaeologists have chosen to recover them (e.g. you very rarely find a lot of smaller mammals or birds because the bones are small enough that the archaeologist have to be consciously using a small-mesh screen to sieve the fill during excavation – without remembering this you may think that you have found a site with nothing living on it but cows and horses and nothing smaller!)

I generally dump the particular box or bag I’m working on onto the table and sort the bones and teeth into piles. All teeth and jaws in a pile, all easily-identifiable long bones of mammals and birds, fragments too broken to be able to do anything with, all ankle/wrist bones, all finger bones, all pelvises, all shoulder blades, etc. Ribs and vertebrae, because they’re fragile and look very similar among species, just get piled together and I’ll note that, from this context, I have some ‘large’ and ‘medium’ ribs and maybe just some ‘medium’ vertebrae. There is a scale there, though – medium is sheep, goat, fallow deer, roe deer, etc. Small is essentially cat/rabbit or smaller.

Next, it’s just a matter of running through the piles. Obviously, identifying a bone as the lower half of a sheep tibia tells you that, at some point, a sheep died and left one of his legs around. But if you want to go beyond just a list of taxa (species) at a site, you have to measure the bones. This is called biometry, and is the best tool zooarchaeologists have to talk about the sex, age, management practices, etc. of domestic and wild animals. For instance, if you look at lots of sheep teeth from a site and note how worn down the teeth are, you can get an idea of age. If all of the teeth are very worn, obviously the sheep were pretty long-lived. If everything you find is very unworn, or even still erupted out of the jaw, with lots of milk (“baby”) teeth, then the poor lambs didn’t make it long before being killed – perhaps to free up their mother’s milk for human use.

The Department of Archaeology at Sheffield has a pretty fantastic reference collection of most species you’d have ever found in Britain, with rows of shelves and cabinets with “box of an adult sheep” and “box of young chicken,” etc. The most common large mammals – horse, donkey, cow, sheep, goat, red deer, fallow deer, roe deer, cat, dog, hare, badger, otter, etc. – have all of their respective elements in more convenient drawers in the little office next to my lab, so I tended to make a few dozen trips an hour back and forth to confirm an identification. I’d note that what I had was the distal end of a right sheep femur (for example), and then move back to my computer and calipers, where I’d measure all the dimensions one needs to compare femurs, record the measurements in the database, and move on. Obviously, there’s a method to keeping track of two parts of the same bone. One of the primary pieces of data most zooarchaeologists compile first is the “minimum numbers of individuals” or “MNI” of a group of bones. Essentially: if you have 5 sheep femurs – 2 lefts and 3 rights, and you assume that throughout history sheep have all always had just the two per body, than you would say that you have at least three sheep. Obviously, there could have been 17 sheep there, but three’s our best minimum guess. So, I have to treat the bottom half of a femur and the top half of a femur separately, and when I go to do my counts, take into consideration that they could actually be the same femur and thus shouldn’t be counted twice.

Something that took a longer period of my July time than I had planned was the teeth. Teeth. I’ve not had much experience in the way of looking at teeth so far in my zooarchaeological career, so I had to do a bit of catch-up for a few days. But, surprisingly, once you get the hold of them, teeth are much quicker than bones. Especially because you generally only find molars and premolars, and I tend to have been lucky to have mostly complete mandibles (lower jaw) and maxillas (upper jaws, usually with some skull attached) which helps figure out which tooth is which. Mammals, including humans, all thankfully have a known dental formula for how many teeth we have where, and the sequence in which we loose our milk teeth for permanent teeth. For these too, I’d have to consult our drawers of mandibles and jaws of loose teeth, then record the wear of the teeth, measure the width and length, etc.

That was essentially my July, working from 10 AM to 8 or 9 PM every day, getting home at 10 PM just in time to seemingly start it all again. Now that I’m finished with that and have all of my data, this week I’m doing nothing but analyzing my data and creating the tables and figures I’ll need for my thesis. I can compare my two sites to each other with the sizes of sheep, for instance, to examine if the castle site had larger, more well-fed sheep than the manor house, or maybe they were just being used for wool instead of meat, in which case I’d look for smaller, but longer-lived, sheep in my data. Or, I can compare my sites with data from other castle sites in the area to see if my castle falls in line with neighboring land-owning estates in terms of the type and size of animals found there. As in another example: I’ve found a fair number of chicken, pheasant, and even some geese and duck bones. How do these specialty items compare to other similar sites? In the end, after all, it’s all about not just what was being eaten, but the choices people made in terms of the amount of effort and energy they put into their diet and their livestock.