Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 323

Animals were of central importance in the lives of Neolithic people in Europe and Britain (from the seventh millennium cal BC in Greece, and from the fourth millennium cal BC in Britain). They were staples of subsistence, means of exchange, sources of wealth and standing, both as living stock and meat to be distributed in feasts, and potent symbols, both in themselves and by association with human identities; they were good to think as well as good to eat. But was their significance the same everywhere? Did people rely on animals in different ways in different places and at different times? Can we see pattern in the development of animal use through time and from region to region? And can we address all dimensions of the importance of animals with equal success using archaeological evidence?

Studies of animals in the Neolithic, and in both earlier and later periods of prehistory, are at a very interesting stage. Specialists maintain their necessary rigorous skills of identification and analysis, but have broadened the scope of their interpretations beyond the purely economic and technical (if they were ever quite so neatly confined), and at the time more prehistorians interested in modelling social and conceptual aspects of past communities have been looking at animal bone data much more closely, especially at their deposition and treatment in varying contexts. This book, another in an established and successful Neolithic Studies Group series, and produced to its usual high standards by Oxbow Books, very nicely illustrates many of these trends. Its range is impressive: geographically from Greece to Britain, and thematically from wolves and dogs (Clark), wild game (Boyle, Zeiler) and animal fodder (Dineley) to the integration of sheep with crop cultivation in lowland Greece (Halstead), evidence for ploughing with cows on a modest scale from an early stage at Knossos on Crete (Isaakidou), patterns of consumption at caves on the Adriatic coast (Miracle), and feasting and symbolism in southern Britain (Serjeantson, Pollard, Field). Diversity is the overall impression, and this is celebrated in the closing paper by Alberella.

There are both possible trends and stubborn questions remaining within this diversity. The use of wild game declines quite rapidly in some contexts, both in the early Neolithic of Greece and that of southern Britain. Halstead argues in passing for this as a clue to an introduced way of life in Greece, more or less sedentary from the outset, while Pollard is inclined to see potential symbolic or conceptual significance in the avoidance of wild game in southern Britain. Boyle, on the other hand, underscores the point that wild game can still be plentiful in later Neolithic assemblages in parts of central and western Europe. The killing and partial dismemberment of an aurochs in a late Neolithic or early Bronze Age context in west London are suggested by Cotton and colleagues to have been done in a consciously archaic manner.

Using the rich data from the settlement mounds of northern Greece, Halstead argues that animals, notably the numerically dominant sheep, were closely integrated with crop cultivation, but played a subsidiary role overall in early Neolithic diet. They may have functioned, within small-scale, intensive subsistence regimes, as sources of manure, grazers of crops in danger of excessive early growth and hence frost damage, and as a flexible alternative to crops when and if those failed, though normally crops and plants may have provided the major portion of consumed food. Cattle and pigs became more prominent in later stages of the Greek Neolithic. Other contexts provide both comparison and contrast. Using the data from one Croatian cave, Miracle documents how people in the middle Neolithic were concerned with the herding of sheep in spring, culling very young animals to boost milk or cheese production (in the late Neolithic, more cattle and pigs and also game and sub-adult sheep were slaughtered for meat in autumn). Whatever the overall patterns of use in the region, the experience of people, and the associations of the place, changed over time.

In southern Britain, Pollard argues for possible and fluid conceptual distinctions and human associations between wild game (perhaps deliberately avoided on the whole, but regarded as powerful and special), cows (perhaps redolent of the ancestral dead), pigs (sometimes associated with dead males) and sheep (perhaps on occasions associated with routine and even female activities). These suggestions are drawn from broad synthesis of the early Neolithic, whereas Serjeantson presents a long-awaited first detailed study of the animal bones from just one settlement, at Runnymede in the middle Thames valley. It is much harder here to provide models which integrate crop and animal evidence. Though the spectrum of use was probably broad, it is possible that here animals were more important than cereal or dairy products. Most of the meat eaten was from pigs and cattle, especially the latter. Most cattle were fully grown, and their apparently regular or at least recurrent slaughter implies consumption on a collective scale, perhaps in the form of feasts. An important, detailed study of bone fragmentation, however, serves to complicate this straightforward picture. The bones of both cattle and pigs are highly fragmented, which may imply their use in soups and stews rather than in fillets or roasts. Whether this indicates other forms of communal eating is left as an open question.