Fodder for Change: Animals, Urbanisation, and Socio-Economic Transformation in Protohistoric Italy

Abstract

In central and northern Italy, the first millennium BC was characterised by the rise of urbanism and an expansion of nearly every area of production. Agriculture was no exception, and an increase in the scale and intensity of agricultural production sustained, and was sustained by, economic and population growth. Within this context, animal management also evolved to meet the needs of the changing protohistoric landscape. Pigs grew in importance as meat producers, and a greater emphasis was placed on animal-derived products like wool. These changes can be linked to the subsistence requirements of urban populations and the value of raw materials; however, beyond these functional explanations, the wider socioeconomic context of animal husbandry is rarely explored. This paper aims to bridge the gap between the zooarchaeological evidence for livestock production and the socioeconomic transformations that drove animal management. Three aspects of protohistoric husbandry are explored through discussion of pig, cattle, sheep, and chicken exploitation: greater differentiation in livestock production between different site types, specialisation of animals through selective breeding, and the adoption of new forms of livestock. These lines of evidence demonstrate the role of animals in socioeconomic networks of distribution and dependence, and they highlight the importance of agricultural produce in the articulation of social hierarchies. As in the transformation of other forms for material culture during this of this period, livestock husbandry regimes were not simply the deterministic result of wider socioeconomic change, but a medium actively adapted for its expression.

Redefining the timing and circumstances of the chicken's introduction to Europe and north-west Africa

“…Our results support the accepted chronology that chickens were present in Italy by the eighth century BC (Trentacoste 2020; Corbino et al . in press).…”

“…Our results support the accepted chronology that chickens were present in Italy by the eighth century BC (Trentacoste 2020;Corbino et al in press). This is a similar timeframe to their arrival on the Balearic Islands, where a chicken bone has been directly dated to the eighth to sixth century BC (Ramis et al 2017).…”

“…The same applies to Italy, where the earliest identified chicken is from a tenth to ninth-century BC tomb (Corbino et al . in press), with other possible eighth-century examples (see OSM) (De Grossi Mazzorin & Minniti 2019; Trentacoste 2020), although, crucially, none of these have been directly dated. It is possible that this pattern could be the product of research bias resulting from the preferential excavation of funerary contexts.…”

“…By the sixth to fifth centuries BC, chickens had become more abundant and were occasionally eaten on settlement sites (e.g. at Forcello, Bagnolo San Vito, where chicken bones show butchery marks), and they only became a more frequent dietary component from the fourth century BC (De Grossi Mazzorin & Minniti 2019;Trentacoste 2020). Similarly, in the Levant, although chickens were present in the ninth/eighth century BC (Peters et al 2022), it was not until the fourth/third century BC that they became a commonly exploited source of meat (Perry-Gal et al 2015).…”

Proteomics and Integrated Techniques to Characterize Organic Residues in Funerary Findings from Italic Populations of the First Millennium BC

“…The farming sites of the ancient Mediterranean communities, especially in the southern Italy communities of Magna Graecia, predominantly involved the breeding of sheep and goats, while pig husbandry progressively increased up to the Roman imperial age. 33 However, many reports have confirmed that cattle were domesticated some 10 500 years ago. 34 Consistently, a detailed proteomic analysis of calcified deposits in vessels from the ancient site of Çatalhoÿuk in Anatolia (ca.…”