M-L. Nosch, A. Ulanowska, K. Żebrowska, K. Bigoraj and A. Gręzak (2021) Sheep – ‘a Factory without Waste’. Comparative, Interdisciplinary and Diachronic Views on Sheep in the Aegean Bronze Age, in R. Laffineur, T.G. Palaima eds, ZOIA. Aegaeum 45, 35-49 (contents and 1st page) (original) (raw)

Animal husbandry and its associated products is one of the two main aspects of food production, and a major element of primary production. The aim of this paper is to draw a sketch of animal husbandry, its practices and its economic and social role in Albania, Epirus and the Helladic Sphere, three areas seemingly far away - but sometimes potentially rather close - through the Bronze and the Early Iron Ages (3000-800 BC).

The iconography of Bronze Age Crete has long been noted for the abundance of animal imagery. The excavator of Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans, explained these depictions in terms of ‘nature-loving Minoans’: as part of the reassessment of long-held concepts in ‘Minoan’ archaeology this thesis offers a different framework for considering animals in Bronze Age Cretan material culture. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of ‘animal studies’ it provides a perspective which foregrounds human-animal relationships, rather than the prevailing onesided view in which humans impose meanings on animals. The affordance concept, in which meanings arise from interaction, offers a balanced way to consider the relations between humans, animals and material culture. Sealstones, frescoes, zoomorphic figures, ceramic decoration, animal bones and written documents are all regarded as material traces of human-animal relations, each medium potentially implicated in different types of human-animal relationships or ‘animal practices’. Iconographic and statistical analysis are used to establish the potential significance of these traces: different types of animals are depicted in different ways and occur in varying frequencies in each medium. This demonstrates that they were used actively to convey information about animals rather than reflecting a passive interest in the natural world. The implications of this approach for an understanding of Bronze Age Cretan society are considered.

In areas where the extent of animal management is debated, stable isotope analysis of animal teeth provides valuable insights into the diet and mobility of herders and their animals. Current research on ancient pastoralism in Thessaly, Greece, is divided over the presence, prevalence, and degree of seasonal livestock movement (transhumance), a discussion often referred to as the agropastoral debate. We present the first application of stable isotope methods to contribute to this discussion, and include a case study from the Hellenistic (323-31 BCE) site of Kastro Kallithea in Thessaly. In particular, we serial sample sheep and goat third molars (M 3) recovered from Building 10 and isotopically analyze the resulting enamel segments to record diet (δ 13 C), sea-sonality (δ 18 O), and geolocation (87 Sr/ 86 Sr). We integrate the use of stable isotope analysis with archaeological, ethnographic, and literary data to examine various management strategies used in Thessaly. We present evidence of sedentary and seasonally mobile management, including the first recorded cases of transhumant animal management in Thessaly from the Hellenistic period. Each management strategy has corresponding impacts on ancient economy, human ecology, land use, and human-animal relationships. Research of this nature has only just started gaining precedence in Greece, but is a valuable tool for studying the spatiotemporal distribution of shepherding and ultimately recording animal management strategies in the Mediterranean.

Pastoralism in Central Asia directed the utilization of natural resources, yet information on livestock management strategies remain scarce. Carbon (δ13C) and oxygen (δ18O) isotope analyses of domesticated sheep teeth are used to identify animal management strategies. Sheep from Kent exhibit an inverse relationship where low δ18O values coincide with high δ13C values, consistent with the foddering of caprines in the winter for this location which occurs alongside evidence for an extended lambing season. At the high altitude encampment of Turgen, Bronze Age sheep exhibit low δ18O values that coincide with high δ13C values, suggesting that livestock were moved to low altitude pastures in the winter months. Iron Age sheep sequences also have an inverse relationship, where low δ18O values coincide with high δ13C values, yet high δ13C values in the winter suggest that livestock were foddered. Our findings indicate variation in livestock management strategies with distinct adaptations to local ecologies.

In recent years, extensive archaeological studies have provided us with new knowledge on wool and woollen textile production in continental Europe during the Bronze Age. Concentrations of large numbers of textile tools, and of zooarchaeological evidence suggesting intense sheepherding, hint at specialized centres of wool production during the Bronze Age. The aim of this paper is to discuss whether engagement with this economic activity was facilitated by the introduction of new foreign sheep types, possibly from the Eastern Mediterranean, where well-established wool economies existed, or by using local sheep, or a mixture of local and non-local types. A small-scale genetic pilot study, presented in this paper, primarily aimed at testing the DNA preservation, and thus the genomic potential in Bronze Age sheep remains provides evidence of both mitochondrial haplogroups A and B among Bronze Age sheep in Hungary. This result could hint at sheep herds with mixed origin but further in-depth studies are necessary to address this. We aim to promote scholarly interest in the issue and propose new directions for research on this topic.

The 18th International Aegean Conference on the subject of Zoia (literally ‘creatures endowed with an anima or life force’) was conceived and organized by Robert Laffineur and Tom Palaima, director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) in the Department of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin, marking 30 years of their collaboration on Aegaeum volumes and conferences. In the event, Covid-19 forced the cancellation of the conference proper. This volume, however, testifies to the dedication of Aegeanist scholars worldwide to accomplish the scholarly objectives of the proposed conference: to examine, from a wide range of specialist research perspectives, how the human societies that developed in the Aegean area in the Middle and Late Bronze Age and the human beings within them interacted with wild, domesticated and semi-domesticated animals of the sea, sky and land socio-politically, economically, religiously, ideologically, imaginatively and artistically.

The author challanges the widespread notion that wool was introduced in Crete only during the Bronze Age. The survey of faunal, archaeological and iconographical evidence seems to support the idea that that wool-bearing sheep (hairy medium?) were introduced in an earlier stage, in the Final Neolithic if not before, perhaps acquiring a special symbolic value, at the end of the IV millennium b.C. It is probable, however, that in this moment wool did not play the predominant role within textile manufacture, and was used together with other vegetal fibers (not necessarily flax), as demonstrated by the wide range of weight and diameter of Neolithic spindle-whorls. The first step forward, a few centuries, was the exploitation of the possibility of obtaining painted garments perhaps through the introduction of a new breed and the evolution of non pigmented coat. This happened round the middle of the third millennium, as demonstrated at Myrtos. In this moment the two breeds attested in the second millennium and perhaps also in the Akrotiri paintings (with hairy medium fleece and generalised medium fleece) were already present in the third. Further development of woollen manufacture was more a matter of technology than of zoology, since there is no evidence for the introduction of new species during the remaining part of the Bronze Age. In particular, the “invention of purple”, at the beginning of the second millennium, gave the Minoan textiles the possibility to explore the full potential of patterns, spirals, even figural representations, influencing pottery decoration and creating in the neopalatial period, fabrics as complex as Gobelins embroidery in Modern Europe (Barber). Moreover, the paper suggests the possibility that, with the introduction of wool, according to the model of McCorriston, areas less suitable for agricultural exploitation, as the mountain regions of eastern Crete, could find in wool production and in the manufacture of painted yarns (and textiles?) an economic chance to balance the more favourable conditions of large plains. This economic specialisation could also explain why sheep and goats are so few represented in archival documents from Minoan palaces, who could limit themselves to the acquisition of already finished yarn and cloth for the manufacture of rich textiles, but this aspect goes beyond the scope of the present paper.