Livestock and landscape: animals and fields in later prehistory (Clare Randall)

Livestock and landscape: animals and fields in later prehistory (Clare Randall)

We have long understood that the deposition of animal bone in the Bronze and Iron Age is a complex matter, the final event in animal biographies, often as symbolic and social as it is economic. However, we have tended to neglect the obvious fact that animals relate to landscapes as much as, and in some ways more intimately, than people do. Consideration of the large animal bone assemblage from Cadbury Castle, Somerset, and contemporary assemblages in the surrounding landscape, in comparison to systems of land division, is beginning to elucidate how the agricultural hinterland actually functioned, but also how its inhabitants understood it. Changes in organisation and scale of field systems and evidence for a change from extensive livestock rearing to intensive and highly integrated agricultural systems, change over time with particular changes coinciding with the development of the hillfort. The amount of animal bone and the mode of its deposition on the hill, compared with the sites in its immediate hinterland implies that it was the final destination of many of the animals that lived out their lives in the fields and commons in its shadow.

Clare Randall, Bournemouth University

No