Conquest by Cattle

Measured by biomass, cattle are today's most important animal. And the foundations for this overwhelming relevance in the modern world were undoubtedly laid during the Roman period: It is a well-known fact that the spread of the Empire was accompanied by an astonishing rise of cattle in both quantity and quality. The absolute numbers of these animals increased rapidly while the diversity of breeds also did. And in no other period had this domestic animal such a high average age. Yet, the circumstances of these changes are poorly understood. 'Conquest by Cattle' aims to close this gap.

The project will analyse cattle remains from the late Iron Age and Roman period in South Britain. The combination of Geometric Morphometrics and Stable Isotope Analysis will allow drawing a detailed picture of the life that these animals had. Isotope Analysis will inform us about dietary changes, seasonal movement and geographical origin, forming the baseline for understanding the biographies of different cattle populations. This will be complemented by Geometric Morphometric Analysis of limb bones, especially the astragali, calcanea, and metapodia. It was already demonstrated that these elements show traces of the life history of domestic animals, such as their use as traction animals or skeletal pathologies due to overworking. But 'Conquest by Cattle' will further try to establish Geometric Morphometrics as the key to solve yet another puzzle that surrounds Roman Cattle: The successful identification of different breeds.

The ancient literary sources make it clear that the Roman world had an incredibly high degree of livestock specialisation and breeding. Heavy soil should be ploughed by a bigger breed, whereas milk would be best gained from small and easy-tempered cows. Big white bulls were rare animals, yet favoured for specific sacrifices like the ones made during a triumph. Zooarchaeologists have been keen on finding the archaeological evidence for this testified breed variety, but the methods could simply not verify the presence of different breeds in the record. This is because Traditional Metrics, i.e. length and breadth measurements on various skeletal elements, can be heavily distorted by various factors like castration, malnutrition, or diseases. It was often remarked that the bone measurements during the Roman period show a greater variety than those of the British Iron Age, but that this is due to breed-alteration rather than changing husbandry practices remains to be proved.

However, Geometric Morphometric was recently applied on bovine cheek teeth and allowed the successful identification on species-level, which is especially interesting as teeth are less influenced by epigenetic factors than other skeletal elements. This PhD will try to refine the method to an extent which allows the identification of different breeds within the archaeological record.

After gathering the relevant data with the described methods, 'Conquest by Cattle' will finally construct an interpretational framework out of the recent theoretical approaches from Globalisation Studies and the thorough interpretation of ancient literature in its original language. This way, we will be able to understand the emerging importance of cattle for the western world during the Roman period like we never did.