Zooarchaeological Perspectives on Iron Age and Roman Eastern Alpine Cattle Husbandry

This thesis investigates Iron Age and Roman cattle husbandry strategies in the Eastern Alps. It highlights regional differences in kill-off patterns, size and shapes of cattle and traces regional diachronic developments. These provide a zooarchaeological view on cultural contact and its impact on regional agricultural, economic, and ultimately social structures. This work is organised as a ‘publication format’ thesis, with five chapters presented as papers following an original introduction, utilising diverse methods and anatomical elements to investigate osteological variability in modern and premodern cattle. The first two chapters summarise the frequency, as well as size and shape of premodern cattle in the eastern Alps. The others focus on selected anatomical elements. Teeth were selected because they are generally well preserved in archaeological contexts, inform on the age of the animals, and serve as a proxy measure for their size. Compact astragali also exhibit comparatively good preservation and low sexual dimorphism, and are, therefore, suited to detailed morphological analyses.
The main aim of investigating cattle husbandry strategies is approached by various interlaced avenues, which focus on restricted aspects of this larger issue and provide various perspectives. Besides substantially increasing zooarchaeological data for the Eastern Alps, this thesis aims at following objectives. First, to provide a regional survey of dietary and animal utilisation patterns in Noricum from the Iron Age to the Late Roman period. Second, to highlight subregional and temporal variability by diachronic and regional comparison of cattle size and shape. Third, to propose a novel method for constructing kill-off profiles for adult and elderly cattle using occlusal tooth ratios. Fourth, to establish new measurements on cattle teeth which can serve as proxies for monitoring genetic change. And fifth, to investigate the effect of sex, breed and environment on shape differences in cattle astragali.