Flying through history: human-raptor relationships in Britain

For over a millennium in Britain hawks and falcons have held a unique relationship with humans through the medium of falconry. Despite a plethora of research surrounding these birds, most archaeological literature addressing falconry synthesises data from published site reports. While this methodology has illuminated the scope of falconry within Britain, it only provides a cursory insight into the nature of human-raptor relationships, not allowing for in-depth assessment of the archaeological material. This thesis presents a comprehensive and multi-scalar re-examination of the osteological remains from British sites dating from AD 250 to AD 1750. At the macroscale it provides a spatio-temporal distribution of raptors on archaeological sites, from which a timeline of falconry in Britain can be derived. At the micro-scale, this thesis will utilise four novel methodologies, to explore falconry practice like never before:

Chapter 1 will present a morphometrical baseline in the form of a reference guide and a metrical database allowing the revision of species, sex, and age of raptors at a sample of British sites. Chapter's 2 & 3 will integrate traditional skeletal analysis, with micro-CT imaging and stable isotopic analysis, to explore the roles of health and diet in captive management. This will assess the validity of using paleopathology and dietary isotopes as an indicator of captivity in the past. Chapter 4 will present a fine-grained analysis of individual bird life-histories (osteobiographies) to explore falconry practice at eight English archaeological sites.

Overall, this research will illuminate the long-term dynamics of human-raptor relationships spanning the medieval period, presenting the value of re-visiting specimens to uncover individual life-histories. The results will not only aid the understanding of past human attitudes to the natural world, but also contextualise and inform on present captivity practices.