The Various Voices of Medieval Animal Bones

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The Various Voices of Medieval Animal Bones
Alice M. Choyke, Kyra Lyublyanovics, László Bartosiewicz
(Budapest)
Introduction
Animals have been woven almost imperceptibly into the complex web of
human existence from the very beginning of human history. From the far off
times of the Paleolithic past up to the present day, animals have permeated every
aspect of our ancestors’ lives and our own.
Archaeozoology is the identification, analysis and scientific as well as
socio-cultural interpretation of animal remains from archaeological sites. Such
zoological finds have been exposed to ancient human activity (animal husbandry,
processing etc.). Consequently, archaeological animal bone assemblages
are “artifacts” that embody cultural processes.
Often the human-animal interaction was purely practical, basically geared
toward subsistence. Animals, coming from agricultural production systems were
selected for slaughter, their carcasses divided between artisans working in
various crafts and the butchers who sold their meat. These assemblages tell
archaeozoologists what species were eaten, how old the animals were, what they
looked like etc. Marks of butchery reflect carcass partitioning both by the
butcher and later during food preparation. These steps all involve choices
fundamentally dependent on idiosyncratic cultural practices. These tend to be
conservative and change only slowly unless radical outside pressure is exerted
on food traditions.
The economically most important domestic animals, sheep (Ovis aries),
goat (Capra hircus), cattle (Bos taurus) and pig (Sus domesticus) provided meat
and milk for food. Their skins were made into clothing such as tunics and shoes
or parts of equipment including straps for harnesses. The production of and trade
in these goods formed significant parts of medieval economies. Bones, teeth,
antlers and horns were also made into all sorts of utensils and ornaments, widely
sold and used throughout every period.
Before the advent of mechanization, horse (Equus caballus), donkey
(Equus asinus) and mules/hinnies (Equus mulus/hinnus) as well as cattle were
used to move people and goods long distances and pull heavy loads in agriculture,
construction work and military transport. Draught oxen were widely used
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during the Middle Ages and much appreciated in heavy-duty work such as tillage
and forestry work. Training good ox teams was a lengthy and tedious task,
which made them especially valuable (Bartosiewicz et al. 1997). During the
16th-17th-century Ottoman Turkish occupation of Hungary great numbers of camels
(Camelus sp., probably dromedaries), were used in shipping artillery
supplies (Bartosiewicz 1996).
Hunting in the Middle Ages was restricted to the nobility but was always
maintained as a mark of status and male identity. The most important game animals
were red deer (Cervus elaphus) and wild boar (Sus scrofa). From archaeozoological
assemblages and contemporaneous images we know that hare (Lepus
europaeus) was also hunted, beaver (Castor fiber) and ermine (Mustela erminea),
important fur animals, were also important in trade. Of course, all sorts
of fish (Pisces), were also key items in the fasting diets throughout Catholic
Europe. Even aquatic mammals, beaver and otter (?; Lutra lutra) could form a
legitimate part of meals for Lent.
Naturally, living with animals so closely, beasts existed for people on a
mental level as well. For the elite classes the ownership of special breeds of
dogs (Canis familiaris; fig. 1), highly-bred horses and sure-footed saddle mules
as well as birds of prey used in falconry (chiefly Accipitridae) represented the
closeness of the animal-human connection beyond everyday practicality. Importantly,
such animals were also markers of status and prestige.
Fig. 1: Dog breeds in the 14th-century Buda Royal Court.
The variability in shape and pelage is indicative of selective breeding,
difficult to detect in the archaeological record (Zolnay 1971).
Conversely, some exotic animals in their strangeness roamed on the
darker, more sinister side of people’s imaginations, frequently depicted in scenes
of hell and the damned. From very early times, parts of animals were combined
to make fantastic beasts also with their recognized qualities and topoi. Such
beasts existed vividly in the imagination of medieval people. Perhaps, even if
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they were not encountered on a daily basis they were still an ever-present part of
the culturally acknowledged structure and explanation of the world as it was understood
by people in a given community at a given time.
Even relatively straightforward depictions of animals in medieval times
display inter-specific mixing of body parts, so that even the well-known species
such as horses may be shown with carnivore paws and dogs with hooves. This is
in contrast with the Roman world where fantastic animals are depicted combining
traits from multiple species but were clearly separated from the animals of
everyday life, depicted very prosaically, realistically, as they would be described
today in the western world. Finally, animals entered speech as metaphors about
the nature of the world. It is on this level that the borderline between what is the
nature of a human and what is the nature of an animal becomes fundamentally
blurred so that angels have wings and devils cloven hooves or bird claws.
Fig. 2: The osteological reconstruction of a unicorn
made in 1678 by von Guericke (Leibniz 1749).
It may look surprising, that the first known osteological reconstruction
took place within the context of scholarly research into unicorns. The skeleton
of this animal (also depicted in Platina’s 1542 cookbook; Fahrenkamp 1986:
34), was assembled in good faith by Otto von Guericke (1602–1686) from the
scattered remains of a mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and other extinct
ungulates, recovered from a sinkhole near Zeunickenberg, Saxonia (Leibniz
1749; fig. 2). (Von Guericke was acclaimed for his famous 1650 Magdeburg
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vacuum experiment: two teams of eight horses were unable to pull apart the
brass hemispheres whose air content had been sucked out).
Limitations on archaeozoological data – taphomony
Archaeozoologists study animal bones encountered in many forms and in
various conditions at archaeological sites. Archaeozoological investigations
rarely rely on single special finds but rather on the patterns that emerge from
analyzing many aspects of large assemblages of animal bones, sometimes comprising
many thousands of fragments. The bones are typically found damaged
and broken. Identification, where possible, is often based on specific morphological
details particular to the bones of different species.
Archeozoological assemblages, however, are affected by both natural and
cultural transformation processes (Schiffer 1995: 173-189). By the time they appear
on the tables of archaeozoologists, they have gone through a series of selective
processes that effect which bones survive and in what condition. Recognition
of those processes is very important in establishing the power and limitations
of this kind of data, just in the same way that it is important to recognize
the limitations of written sources which have undergone their own path(s) of
selection. This branch of palaeontology and archaeozoology, the critical evaluation
of sources, is called taphonomy (Efremov 1940). Taphonomy is the study of
post-mortem changes in animal remains.
The concept of taphonomy will not be unfamiliar for researchers working
with written sources. Who really knows how completely historical sources reflect
medieval realities? What was (evidently selectively) entered into the record
and how many of the written documents actually survived? Rules of taphonomy
apply, in specific ways, to most disciplines concerned with reconstructing the
past.
First, certain animals were selected for slaughter or died at a settlement.
Those that simply die and are not exploited for their skins or meat will often be
dumped and will at most be affected by scavenger activities and how quickly the
carcasses were disposed of. Typically in medieval Hungary dog and horse are
less likely to have been eaten and thus, more likely to be found as articulated or
semi-articulated skeletons on sites. If such animal corpses are deposited off settlement
(e. g. on the roadside), their chances of recovery by archaeologists dramatically
decrease. This may explain, why only a fraction of camel bones, expected
on the basis of the Ottoman Period military records, are actually recovered
by archaeologists (fig. 3).
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Fig. 3: Fragments of a camel elbow joint and a hip bone
from the Ottoman Turkish Period timber fort of Szekszárd–Palánk. Scale bar = 50 mm.
Animals killed for their meat and hide tend to be well-represented in excavated
assemblages. The slaughtered animals were first selected from a herd.
The criteria for selection (e. g. age and sex) depended on whom the animal
products were intended for, since wealthier patrons in the Middle Ages were
more likely to have access to younger, healthier animals for food. After being
slaughtered and skinned, the animal’s carcass would have been divided and distributed
depending on who owned the animal, which people or groups had rights
to its meat or went through distribution networks among the butchers at major,
urban settlements. Next, the body parts would have been further cut up into potsize
pieces depending on local culinary traditions. Cooking and consumption
further affect what bones are found and how they are preserved. On the one
hand, food processing means that more bones, that is, zoological information
were destroyed, but on the other, activities related to butchering and culinary
practices leave tell-tale, repetitive signs of traditional carcass treatment which
reflect varying customs within and between different socio-economic groups in
the Middle Ages. The presence of particular skeletal elements from food processing
can also be interpreted by written sources such as contemporary cookbooks.
In addition to food-processing, the survival of the bones also depended
on how they were thrown away, to what extent were they exposed to natural,
post-depositional conditions during fossil diagenesis (Lyman 1994). Charters,
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account books and images from the same time and region can also be of tremendous
help in interpreting patterning in refuse bone accumulations.
Unfortunately, it must be added that the final taphonomic factor is all too
often the excavating archaeologist, who chooses the location to be uncovered,
and makes technical decisions concerning the precision of excavation techniques,
methods of documentation and storage. Excavations at medieval sites are
all too often centered primarily on architectural structures such as walls, rather
than the full range of material culture. In addition, techniques of fine recovery,
such as screening or water-sieving the excavated material are often ignored. This
leads to the size-selective loss of remains from small animals (fish, birds, reptiles,
small mammals; Bartosiewicz 1983). Bones of young individuals can also
be found only using careful techniques and yet such bones would provide valuable
information about herd management strategies and culinary custom.
Primary and secondary products
Patterns observed in the faunal assemblages primarily reflect meat consumption,
and only indirectly production in terms of herd structure and the
broader economic significance of particular animal species. People have always
exploited animals for their meat, hide, sinews, bone and horn. These kinds of
products require killing the animal and are therefore considered primary products
by archaeozoologists. Primary exploitation produces the bone remains that
are actually found. Secondary products are those which are renewable because
these forms of exploitation do not actually permit killing the animal. Secondary
products include milk and dairy products, wool, manure and animal labor. Animals
used this way must be kept alive for a longer time in order to fully exploit
their production potential. While the concept of secondary products is associated
with domesticates, a special case is represented by shed antler, a wild animal
product that can be gathered without harming the animal.
Domestic pigs have always been raised primarily for meat. In contrast to
unipara domestic ruminants and horse, they have large litters and and a relatively
short reproduction cycle. Thus, many of their offspring can be slaughtered
young without effecting the survival of the herd. Other domestic animal species
tended to be slaughtered after they had outlived their exploitation for secondary
products.
There are many images showing secondary use, otherwise hardly detectable
in the archaeozoological find material. Such iconographic representations
include horses being ridden by the elite, donkeys hauling loads and oxen pulling
wagons and plows. There are also comments on the worth of these animals in
charters and account books as well as many sources referring to their use in long
distance trade. The use of individual animals in hard work may lead to pathological
deformations, chiefly in the lower limb bones (Bartosiewicz et al., 1997).
Sometimes, the archaeological provenance of animal bones, in connection with
information from contemporaneous images, provides further insights into the
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meaning of the faunal assemblage. Thus, horse skeletons buried near structures
like stables from high-status households would be reliably interpreted as riding
horses giving new meaning as well to the size and body conformation of the
skeletons. Many other secondary products from animals cannot be directly inferred
from patterning in the bone material because of all the taphonomic processes
discussed above. Nevertheless, the age and sex structure of herd animals
managed especially for wool and milk (female longevity, fewer males) have
long been recognized in the archaeozoological literature (Payne 1975). In other
words, a particular herd structure means that certain kinds of animals are more
available than others for slaughtering. If such patterns in the faunal material are
compared to relevant historical documents concerning what kinds of animals
and what products are important in the local economy it should then be possible
to build a reliable picture of animal exploitation falling somewhere between the
often ideal situation represented in the documents and the reality on the ground.
This interplay between textual and archaeozoological data will be presented in
the following detailed case study.
Muhi town – archaeozoological data and written sources
from the Great Hungarian Plain
It is clear that at some points archaeozoolgical data and historical sources
support each other and at other points they are contradictory. These latter dichotomies
in the data require explanation which will only be forthcoming after a
number of related studies are carried out using similar, multidisciplinary methodologies.
The archaeozoological analysis of this material is carried out by the second
author of this paper. This brief summary serves to illustrate results as well
as analytical problems that have risen during the ongoing archaeozoological and
historical evaluation of these finds.
The medieval market town of Muhi was located in the northeastern section
of the Great Hungarian Plain, in the foreland of the Northern Hills, near the left
bank of the Tisza River. It belonged to the medieval manor of Diósgyőr (fig. 4).
Excavations brought to light masses of 13th-16th-century animal bones from the
area of this town.
One of the important features of this work is that relatively few written
sources deal with Muhi, making the archaeological information all the more important.
On the other hand, the parallel study of the find material and written
contemporary sources from the broader region surrounding Muhi itself offers an
opportunity to appraise the general versus special relevance of this latter information
to the town itself, underrepresented in the documents. The animal remains
that have been recovered are of help in pinpointing specific features of the
town itself.
There is indeed relatively little in the written sources concerning animal
keeping and livestock trade that deal with Muhi. This may be in part due to the
fact that, to date, relatively little research has been carried out on this topic. It
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was chiefly the joint works by Péter Tóth and András Kubinyi which exploited
archival sources in the region and made many of the sources available. Their research,
however, concentrated on the history of the town of Miskolc.
Fig. 4: The location of the market town Muhi, in the ecotone between
the Great Hungarian Plain and the Northern Hill Region (base map after L. Zentai 1968).
Aside from their work, the comprehensive ethnographic work by Attila
Paládi-Kovács (1993) on the animal keeping culture of Hungary contains numerous
important references and culture historical data. In spite of these important
contributions, however, the information available is sporadic and unreliable.
As will be demonstrated here, the chief difficulty is that the analyst is faced with
differences in the fundamental nature of archaeological and documentary/ historical
evidence that are not necessarily complementary to each other. This
makes placing any information within a coherent context very difficult. Animal
bone measurements used during this archaeozoological study were taken based
on a widely accepted standard (von den Driesch 1976).
Diachronic trends in the representation of domestic animals in the archaeozoological
assemblage of Muhi are summarized in fig. 5. Coincidences and discrepancies
between the picture emerging from the written record and trends
shown in this graph will be briefly reviewed here.
The first question encountered during the study of historical sources concerns
the extent to which the town of Muhi participated in live cattle trade that
gained momentum in Hungary after the 15th century. The geographical location
would have been perfect for this purpose, since Muhi was an important market
center in the vicinity of Miskolc town. Muhi became a market town at the end of
the 13th century, and frequented weekly markets were organized there from the
14th century onwards (Tóth 1994: 115; Borovszky 1909: 48; Bessenyei 1997:
208-209; Szendrei 1911: III: 251). Significant cattle drives toward the town of
Pusztapécs (Auspitz/Hustopeče) in southern Moravia, through Nagyszombat
(Trnava, present-day Slovakia) passed near Muhi. In addition, livestock were
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also driven west from Debrecen toward the Vác ferry across the Danube within
this region.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
13th c. 13-14th c. 14th c. 14-15th c. 15th c. 15-16th c. 16th c.
horse
cattle
pig
small ruminant
Fig. 5: The percentual contribution of main domestic animals
to the archaeozoological assemblage of Muhi (n = 4404)
The types of animal husbandry and herd sizes at individual farms, however,
are difficult to characterize. Local cattle traders also participated in buying up
and driving livestock abroad, in cooperation with their fellow traders on the
Great Hungarian Plain (to the southeast) and in the hilly areas to the north in
present-day Slovakia (Tóth and Kubinyi eds. 1996, II: 345). In addition to primary
documents concerning livestock trade, the increasing quantity and significance
of hay production in the area may be considered an indirect evidence of
intensifying cattle trade (Tóth and Kubinyi eds. 1996, II: 178-179). These
documents are especially valuable, since they indicate a change that may also be
followed in the archaeological material. Possibly with the prosperity coming
from the cattle trade, the bones of this animal become more common in the deposits
of local food refuse as well. In addition, one may expect a change in the
types of animals that includes an increase in average size and homogenization of
the physical types of animals being produced (phenotype). Ultimately, it would
be expected that larger, so-called primigenius type animals became dominant
through time leading to the gradual emergence of the Hungarian Grey breed in
the following centuries (Makkai 1971: 488-489). In this early time period however,
it is not possible to really speak of breeds but rather regional types.
The percentage distribution of the 4404 animal bones identified and studied
so far shows that cattle remained dominant throughout the studied period. A
peak is evident in the 15th century (48.9%), while deposits dated to the 15th-16th
and 16th centuries show some decline in the consumption of beef (37.6 and
31.7% respectively) at Muhi. These proportions, however, certainly reflect the
minimum consumption, since most of the bone fragments from “large mam32
mals” that could not be identified to species also probably originate from cattle
(horse bones contributed only very little to food remains in medieval Hungary).
Appraising the homogeneity and individual size of these animals is more
difficult given the present state of the research. The archaeozoological material
is very fragmented, therefore only a few complete metapodium bones were
available for the estimation of withers height. Nevertheless, as much as it may
be judged from the size of the fragments that have been measured to date, they
represent a small bodied brachyceros, short-horned type1 of cattle. This is not
only characteristic of the material from early, 13th-century deposits, but also in
the later 15th-16th-century material, and is consonant with contemporaneous
iconographic evidence (fig. 6). The situation is further complicated by the possibility
that in the Muhi area, far from the terminal markets in Austria and Southern
Germany, stocks bought from all over the Great Hungarian Plain may still
have been more heterogeneous than would be expected on the basis of coeval
descriptions from German speaking areas. One should not forget that archaeological
finds represent food remains. It is possible that on road stations, such as
the market at Muhi, cattle traders sold the meager looking, less fit animals for
culling. This theory, however, will have to be supported by a greater number of
horn cores and skull fragments waiting to be identified during subsequent research.
Fig. 6: Small, short horned cattle and primitive pigs
with strongly developed bristle in a 1488 woodcut (Thuróczy Chronicle, Brno edition).
In any case, it is noteworthy, that destruction resulting from the expansion
of the Ottoman Turkish Empire annihilated only two settlements in the area,
1 These two cranial types of medieval cattle have been concisely discussed by Attila Paládi-
Kovács (1993: 86-90).
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Muhi and Petri. This falls in line with the theory that Ottoman attacks first damaged
branches of economy that had been vital for the town’s survival. Among
others things, Muhi was a well known center of cereal production. Turkish incursions
must have posed a direct threat to peaceful land cultivation. In addition,
it must also have become increasingly difficult to organize markets.
There is a widely held idea that inhabitants in the areas exposed to Turkish
invasions increasingly abandoned traditional land cultivation and turned to more
flexible forms of range farming. Livestock could be easily mobilized in the case
of emergency and could also be sold at almost any time. The deterioration of
cattle exports coincides with the depopulation of Muhi town. At the same time,
according to written sources, cattle trading peaked in Vác and at other Danube
crossings in the late-16th-century Ottoman Turkish Period (Bartosiewicz 1997-
1998). In 1563 the number of cattle recorded at Vác reached over 6000 animals
on a single day in September (Bartosiewicz 1995: 85, fig. 54). In the same year,
when agents of the Hungarian Chamber appraised the income of the Diósgyőr
Manor, they made special note of the manor’s great potential represented by
trading in animal products (Tóth and Kubinyi eds. 1996, II: 176, 182, 184). This
may indicate that a significant livestock surplus must have been kept in the villages
and towns of the region as required by the daily need of their inhabitants.
Meanwhile, it seems that Muhi had already ceased to exist! The percentual contribution
of cattle bone to faunal assemblages from archaeological sites located
near the cattle trading routes in western Hungary is over 60% (Bartosiewicz
2002: 90, Fig. 2), well exceeding that found at Muhi even when it was at the
peak of its cattle trade. This may be interpreted as reflecting a general increase
in the importance of cattle at focal points in the cattle trade by the 16th-17th-century
Ottoman Turkish Period.
The number of farms specialized in sheep keeping increased during the 16th
century (Paládi-Kovács 1993: 149). Smaller groups of Vlach shepherds settled
in certain, depopulated parts of the Great Hungarian Plain as early as the 15th
century and brought their special herd stocks with them. A good example of this
trend could be observed in the village of Mezőkeresztes, in the proximity of
Muhi. Written sources reveal that Vlach shepherds had special grazing rights on
both banks of the Tisza River, and practiced large-scale sheep husbandry even at
the end of the 16th century.
In 1579, for example, the 22 heads of the families living there paid decimal
taxes in the form of 212 sheep (Borovszky 1909: 151). Tax records from the 16th
century also show a concentration of sheep stocks in other areas of the Great
Hungarian Plain. This may be indicative of the specialization of the livestock
owners. Individual households would not have kept more than one or two sheep
or goat. Although sheep were also bred on the majority of manorial farms in
Northeastern Hungary, peasant farmers and larger enterprises played an even
more decisive roles compared to the manors.
Grazing large herds of sheep near Muhi would explain the great supply of
sheep at the markets of Muhi, often referred to in written documents. István N.
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Kiss studied tax duties paid in lambs in Heves, Borsod, Bihar and Szabolcs
counties. His research has shown that, especially in the regions of Heves and
Borsod counties located near the Tisza river, sheep husbandry was extremely
important. Regional sheep stocks may have been close to 30,000 animals as has
been convincingly illustrated using by N. Kiss (1960). It is likely that these
nearby herds also supplied sheep to the markets of Muhi. In light of these results
derived from written sources it is surprising that the contribution of sheep and
goat bones to the archaeological assemblage at Muhi was relatively low.
In the archaeozoological material, the contribution of small ruminants (predominantly
sheep) is 20.4% in the 14th-century features. This proportion, however,
declines to 15.6% by the turn of the 14th-15th centuries and reaches only
9.3% by the 15th century. An increase may be observed in the 16th-century subassemblage,
up to 17%. Curiously enough, the all time low shown in these data
coincides with the time period that is described as the time of expanding sheep
herding in written sources. This apparent contradiction is yet another warning
that archaeozoological finds directly characterize meat consumption, rather than
animal husbandry. In the case of sheep, a domesticate animal exploited for secondary
products such as wool and milk, the intensive culling of animals for meat
was not in the owners’ long term interest. Several new breeds of sheep developed
in the Carpathian Basin during the 15th-17th centuries (Gaál 1966: 189;
Makkai 1957: 27). Unfortunately, the identification of these forms is practically
impossible on the basis of osteological remains alone, unless horn cores of characteristic
shape are encountered, as would be the case with Racka sheep with its
upward pointing, corkscrew-like horns. The first appearance of this breed post
dates the period under discussion here both in the archaeological material (Bartosiewicz
1995: 166, plate 6) and in the iconographic record (fig. 7).
The northern-northeastern margin of the Great Hungarian Plain was an important
pig keeping region as well. On the basis of written sources, however, it
was Bihar, rather than Borsod county, where these pigs were important. There
are written references to acorn-based pig ranging in the oak forests of the Bükk
hills. This means that fattening actually began once the acorns fell and lasted
until Christmas. Winter fattening was also based on acorn, gathered during the
fall. Forests belonged to the manor’s owner, who therefore collected a decimal
tax paid in pigs (Tóth and Kubinyi eds. 1996 II: 188). From the 14th century onwards,
pigs were also fed on fodder made from grain and milling refuse. A system
developed in which pigs to be fattened were kept near the mill, in the care
of millers. However, only a relatively small number of pigs were kept this way
(Belényssy 1956: 28; Gaál 1966: 121).
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Fig. 7: Early pictorial representation of the characteristic “Racka” horn conformation
(after Marsigli 1726).
Our hypothesis was that pig keeping was not practiced on a commercial basis,
but rather served local demands for meat. Nevertheless, the proportion of pig
bones remains at a steady 12-13% in the archaeological faunal material; at the
turn of the 13th-14th centuries it surpasses the contribution of small ruminant
bones and remains largely at the same level during the Ottoman Turkish Period.
This latter phenomenon contradicts the widely held idea that under the influence
of Islamic food customs pig would have lost significance after the Turkish conquest.
Demand may have somewhat decreased although Turkish authorities
taxed pig keeping, actually maintaining what was formerly collected as pig
decimal tax.
As for trying to reconstruct the type of pigs kept, this work is made difficult
by the fact that, as is usual with meat purpose stock, the remains of young pigs
dominate in the excavated material. Mature body dimensions and morphological
characters are only poorly expressed in the bones of young individuals. There
were hardly any measurable pig bones in the archaeozoological assemblage. The
majority of fragments, however, seem to indicate that these were leggy but small
type pigs with a primitive character, possibly also owing to spontaneous crossings
with wild pig (Bökönyi 1993: 102). A special type of medieval pig with
broad jaws described by Bökönyi (1963: 383; and 1974: 223) has not yet been
encountered in the faunal assemblage from Muhi.
General experience shows that reconstructing late medieval and early modern
age horse keeping is very difficult on the basis of bone remains, since the
remains of horse are rarely encountered in the food refuse. It is likely, however,
that the high levels of horse breeding already recorded in Borsod County in the
10th-13th-century Árpád Period continued supplying exported animals in the
county’s wider environment. Exports to Poland were also recorded. There was a
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considerable market demand represented by the local military during the Ottoman
Turkish Period. Landowners in Diósgyőr also contributed to the horse trade
(Tóth and Kubinyi 1996, I: 274-275; II: 183). Horse, a valuable animal, is well
represented in the written sources. However, since its flesh was not supposed to
be consumed in Christian times, horse bones are relatively rare in ordinary settlement
refuse. This Ottoman Period boom in horse trading also had its dark
side. Horses were regularly taken as war booty by marauding Turkish soldiers
(Paládi-Kovács 1993: 17).
The proportion of horse bones is surprisingly high in the archaeozoological
material from several periods at Muhi. Among the 14th-century finds the contribution
of horse bones was 7.5%, which increased to 15% by the 15th-16th century
(!). However, it is difficult to contextualize this information. The estimation
of minimum number of individuals (based on the frequency of the most commonly
occurring skeletal element) would not make a lot of sense, since almost
all parts of the skeleton are present. On the other hand, all the horse bone that
were found were so scattered, that it is impossible to tell whether any of them
belonged to the same individual in a physical sense. Butchering marks, offering
evidence of defleshing, were not found on these bones: horse remains commonly
occur in the form of such sporadic and isolated finds at medieval sites, representing
carcasses which have been scattered by scavengers rather than broken up
through food processing.
Horses were certainly eaten at the time of the 9th-century Hungarian Conquest,
and this custom was not completely abandoned even after Christianity had
been adopted (Matolcsi 1982: 252-253). However, the horse finds from Muhi
are not relevant to this problem. Although cutmarks occur on the lower, distal
bones of the extremities, such marks are widely regarded as evidence of skinning.
Bone fragmentation cannot be interpreted as the result of meat processing,
since such damage to the bone may be caused by a number of taphonomic factors.
The only convincing evidence of horse flesh consumption would be the
presence of numerous butchered horse bones in the material still remaining to be
studied.
The complete horse bones from Muhi are indicative of a relatively homogeneous
form. They look like gracile, slender-legged animals, often referred to
as of “eastern” character. This general picture is somewhat colored by the variability
in estimated withers heights. Small individuals with withers heights of ca.
130 cm, as well as large horses measuring approximately 150 cm were found in
similar proportions, both in the earlier 13th-14th- and later, 15th-16th-century material.
Naturally, these sporadic estimates, based on single bones, do not justify
speaking of two distinct types, they indicate that one should revise the generally
held opinion that medieval horse stocks consisted of small, primitive forms
(Paládi-Kovács 1993: 97-98).
Some of the bones showed pathological lesions. Most of these are deformations
that may be explained by overworking. It is worth mentioning in this
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regard that horses were used in plowing near the lowland settlements of Borsod
County, such as Muhi.
Consumption versus production of animals and animal products
As is shown by this case study, although the interpretation of animal remains
from archaeological sites is often geared toward the understanding of
animal keeping and animal husbandry in a broader sense, it must be understood
that these fundamental modes of production have been reconstructed from consumption
refuse, left behind at the site in the form of animal bones.
The original production context is, to some extent, represented in the nature
of the site they come from (for example urban, rural, elite or peasant, civilian
or military) and the broader geographical environment of the settlement.
Within sites, the physical context is also important. Animal remains may have
been scattered in open middens, deposited in abandoned wells, pits. They may
also have been associated with special structures such as houses, monastic
dwellings, shops and elite households in castles and palaces. Importantly, understanding
the context for bones can be further improved by a variety of outside
sources, both written and pictorial, providing information about the function of
the settlement and the nature of economic activities carried out there. At simple
rural sites, where animals were brought directly into settlements for slaughter,
some of the stages described above were skipped. At the late antique site of
Aquincum in Budapest bones from the center of the Roman town had clearly
passed through several filtering processes, and above all professional butcher
shops. The Celtic Roman villages on the outskirts display a totally different
picture. Animals were brought directly into the village to be slaughtered and divided
up among families. Methods of dividing the carcass and breaking bones
remained unchanged from that of their pre-Roman Celtic ancestors (Choyke
2004). Even in this case, however, it remains very difficult to discern the herd
structure behind the food consumption patterns from the animal bones recovered
from the two sorts of kitchen refuse.
Leather production leaves accumulations of bones from the lower limbs
and skull often left behind in the hides because it makes it easier to handle and
stretch them. There are a number of images showing this technical solution (fig.
8). Closely associated with tanners were people working in glue. Animal foot
bones especially were broken up to extract the collagen from them. On the
skulls, the osseous horn cores often have cut marks around their bases where the
horn sheath was separated from the bone below it (fig. 9). Bones in skins and
with horn sheaths in place were often directly taken to workshops from urban
slaughterhouses. The Late Roman town of Aquincum has a number of bone accumulations
comprised mostly of horncores and lower limb bones which have
been ascribed to such leather and horn processing workshops (Choyke 2004).
Similar bone accumulations can be expected from medieval Buda and Pest as
well.
38
Fig. 8: Deer skin with the bones of the feet and skull
retained from Dürer’s design of Emperor Maximilian’s triumphal arch.
Fig. 9: Cattle horn core with cutmarks from the Roman Period ditch
near the southern city wall of Aquincum. Scale bar = 50 mm.
Bone and antler working are medieval crafts about which not much is
written although these were widely used raw materials throughout the Middle
Ages. Bone workers in medieval Buda seem to have been associated with wood
workers because both worked on lathes (Kovács 2005). There are no written records
about bone working in Buda although mention in sources is made of a
man named Chontws (‘csontas’ in Hungarian means boney’) who was associ39
ated with people from the Turners’ guild (Kovács 2005: 311). Refuse from the
manufacture of bone objects resulted refuse characteristic of lathe-working so
that the historical sources and the archaeological material complement each
other (fig. 10). Furthermore workshop debris with evidence of sawing and rings
of bones produced when producing rods of bone meant for further working remain
signposts for bone workshops (for example see Gróf and Gróh 2001: 282).
Fig. 10: Bone manufacturing workshop from the 17th century
(Gróf and Gróh 2001: 285, Fig. 5).
Antler from red deer (Cervus elaphus) is an important raw material. More
resilient and denser than bone, it is ideal for tools and ornaments which are subject
to shocks. In the Middle Ages it is likely that most antler was gathered.
Stags shed their antlers in the early spring within particular territories. It was
important to gather the antler immediately as it deteriorated if left lying on the
ground. This suggests that antler-gathering must have been an intensive, seasonal
activity. There must also have existed some form of exchange between urban
craftspeople and the population living in the countryside (MacGregor 1985,
40
36-37). Antler was undoubtedly stockpiled and indeed pits are sometimes found
on sites from many periods containing a few red deer antler racks for storage
throughout the year.
The species chosen and available for working depended on manufacturing
traditions in the particular place and time. It also seems evident that bone was
often worked by artisans such as knife-makers. Again, approximately locating
metal workshops on the basis of written sources combined with the recognition
of refuse from bone manufacture from archaeological sites in their vicinity offers
a fuller picture of manufacturing organization(s) in a particular period.
Domestic and wild
By the Middle Ages, domestic animals provided the overwhelming majority
of the meat consumed. Even food refuse from high status sites shows that
eating meat was the exception rather than the rule. Some of the animals killed,
however, came from the wilderness surrounding human settlements. Animals
were typically hunted by privileged, landed classes with special rights during the
whole of this long period although poaching must have also been sporadically
practiced by all classes. Furthermore, as agricultural territories expanded, many
of the wild animals survived in shrinking habitats or in artificial ‘forest’ reserves
set up by the nobility specifically for sport hunting. Trophies must have been
held in high esteem, especially if they represented fearsome animals and originated
from far away territories. A skull fragment with the pair of upper canine
teeth of an unusually large medieval leopard, found at the queen’s town in
Segesd (Bartosiewicz 2001), must have originated from at least as far as Transcaucasia,
since this animal did not live anywhere closer to Europe. This bone
may have been carried to Hungary as the decorative element in a pelt used as a
rug or as high status attire. This is shown by the high polish on the back side of
the bone, carefully cut off at the animal’s nose (fig. 11).
Fig. 11: Leopard skull fragment with canine teeth from medieval Segesd, Hungary.
The left hand aspect shows high polish over the cut surface. Scale bar = 50 mm.
41
Fishing was also of critical importance in the economic life of Europe because
fish was so important in religious diets. Fish were grown in extensive fish
pond systems and even traded (salted and dried) across the continent and much
has been written about this trade both in historical and archaeozoological literature
(for example Hoffman 1997; Van Neer and Ervynck 2004). Masses of small
fish must have been very important in the diet along rivers, such remains, however,
are difficult to find without water-sieving. In great rivers such as the Danube,
large sturgeon (Acipenseridae) and catfish (Silurus glanis) were caught.
These fish reach huge sizes so their bones are more likely to be found, even
where the excavation techniques are limited to hand-collection. In addition,
there exist excellent images and written documents concerning fishing weirs
along various points on the Danube (Khin 1958). Such a structure and the relevant
historical landscape in the Iron Gates Gorge are shown in an excellent picture
published by Marsigli (1726), an Italian military engineer and polyhistorian,
who traveled along the Danube recording his experiences (Bartosiewicz and
Bonsall 2004: fig. 8).
Consumption of certain luxury animals certainly signaled status during
the medieval period. The consumption of immature animals has already been
mentioned but it is also clear that exotic or unusual animals also appeared on the
tables of the upper classes or aspiring upper classes as a sign of their otherness
from the peasantry (Ervynck et al 2003). One of the specialities newly introduced
to Hungary during the 16th century was turkey (fig. 12; Bartosiewicz
1997). The earliest known bone remains of this New World bird are usually
found in urban deposits and castles (Bartosiewicz 1995).
Fig. 12: Turkey sternum from Turkish Period Székesfehérvár. Scale bar = 50 mm.
Detecting religious behavior
Because many medieval archaeological sites are complex they undergo
continuous re-modeling. This means that it is extremely rare to find deposits in
42
primary position. In addition to floor deposits, storage pits converted to refuse
pits, wells and cisterns offer some chance to find animal remains possibly related
to food proscription. There are increasing numbers of studies of medieval
materials where it has proved possible to recognize food practices in the archaeozoological
material, for example where turtles or aquatic mammals such as
otter or beaver were substituted for fish on fast days in the diet of two religious
orders in Italy (De Grossi Mazzorin and Minniti 1999).
In Hungary, a 12 m deep well was excavated between 1999 and 2000 at
Teleki Palace in the Buda castle and yielded an elaborate piece of textile, shoes
and other rare organic materials, preserved under anærobic circumstances. In
addition, a fragment of a wooden plate decorated with a Star of David and a
fragment of glass with Hebrew writing on it were discovered in the lower layers.
Because of all these special finds, the well was excavated with unusual care, all
the deposits being washed, screened and carefully picked through.
It was known from documents that the first Jewish population was located
somewhere in this area in the 13th-14th century although nothing else was known
about it. It was hoped that the character of the archaeozoological material would
support locating the quarters of this first Jewish population in the area around
the well. It was discovered that with the exception of one bone fragment no pig
bone appeared in the lower levels at the well (Daróczi-Szabó 2004: 252-243).
Jewish dietary law prohibits use of the hind legs of animals like cattle or sheep.
At this site there were fewer hind leg bones in the lower levels. Their presence
may indicate that the Jews there permitted eating meat from these limbs if the
sciatic nerve was properly removed which sheds interesting light on the nature
of the strict observance practiced by this medieval Jewish community (Daróczi-
Szabó 2004: 261). Meanwhile, bones of catfish, a species with no scales, as well
as those of sturgeon, another fish avoided by Jews for the same reason were only
found in the upper levels from a time when the Jewish population had been expelled
from the area (Bartosiewicz 2003a).
Deposits associated with neighborhoods of mixed religion or less observant
Islamic inhabitants during the 150 years of Ottoman Turkish occupation of the
Carpathian Basin show a much less clear cut avoidance of pork (Bartosiewicz
and Gál 2004) something also observed at Muhi cited in this paper. Although
there was a general decline in pig consumption during the Ottoman Period in
Hungary (Bartosiewicz 2003b), prohibition against pork is evident only in the
exclusive, high status habitation of the Pasha’s Palace in Buda (Bökönyi 1974).
Religious behaviour is not only represented in the presence and absence of
certain animal species in the diet. A special example is also worth mentioning
here from the 15th-century Inca Period site of Incarracay in Bolívia (Bartosiewicz
1999). Fine transversal cutmarks were discovered on the ventral surface
of a small camelid (Lama c. f. pacos) atlas, the vertebra adjacent to the skull
(fig. 13). This damage may be alternatively explained by either slaughtering or
patterned carcass partitioning, that is, post mortem decapitation. Since these cuts
occur on the anterior edge of the cranial articular surface, stricto sensu, they
43
may have been caused by the latter, according to the criteria established by Gilbert
(1988: 85, Fig. 5, Pl. XIV/1-4). Nevertheless a neck vertebra damaged by
any cutmarks may be of religious significance at this particular site. In pre-conquest
Perú, sacrificial lamas were killed by tearing their hearts out. In 1615, the
chronicler Poma de Ayala ([1990]: 160) even warns: “Do not kill it this way,
but do it like the Christians nowadays, by cutting the ram’s neck…”. That is,
slitting the animal’s neck was considered a distinctly non-traditional, culturally
idiosyncratic Christian mode of slaughter.
Fig. 13: Small camelid atlas with cutmarks, possibly caused by slaughtering,
from the 16th century. Ventral aspect. Scale bar = 50 mm.
Attributes and symbols
In parallel, humans observing animal behavior and interpreting it in terms
of human social terms began attributing human characteristics to these creatures.
This has helped shape our constantly evolving attitudes toward the world, with
animals forming an integral part of it. Animals conceived as metaphors are not
physically tangible in the same way as the bone remains of those animals. Neither
do the bones themselves, ultimately the results of consumption, shed much
light on the roles of animals in all aspects of social, economic, political or religious
affairs. From the archaeozoologist’s point of view external evidence must
be considered in order to integrate zoological information within a broader picture.
A hat decorated with crane feathers (as well as a reflex bow), are shown in
Dürer’s sketch made for the triumphal march of Emperor Maximilian, entitled
the “Hungarian trophy” (fig. 14). Both the historical and ethnographic record
shows that crane feathers indeed had special ornamental importance in Hungary
(Gunda 1979). The bones of this bird also occur relatively frequently in archaeozoological
assemblages (fig. 15, Jánnossy 1985). Although no evidence of
44
feathers survives in the archaeological record, combining toponyms related to
crane, ethnographically known regions of crane taming and the find locations in
the same map shows a concentration of crane bones (encircled in fig. 15) in the
hilly region of the Danube Bend gorge, relatively far away from the areas
marked by linguistic ethnographic evidence that would logically define ancient
crane habitats. This indirectly shows that cranes, also known to have been kept
as pets in noble households, were exploited away from their preferred environments
(Bartosiewicz in press).
Fig. 14: The “Hungarian trophy” in Dürer’s plan of Emperor Maximilian’s triumphal arch.
Together with common myths and stories about human and animal
interactions, animal images were used to instruct and associated with protective
qualities appearing in the form of amulets. Animals and their products could reflect
prestige either because of their special qualities as a breed or exotic origins
and form. Hunting large game was frequently a test of manhood. Rarely, the
skulls of the large animals show up in contexts suggesting their use as trophies
displayed on walls. There are also examples where skulls of horses were hung
up on buildings for apothropaic purposes. In the correct context such skulls may
also be recognized in archaeological materials. At the beginning of the Middle
Ages in Europe, horses in particular were still placed in the graves of the Avars
people as complete animals. At the time of the 9th-10th-century Hungarian Conquest,
pre-Christian burials contained only the skull and lower limb bones of
45
horses, suggesting the bones were attached to a hide. In any case, these modes of
burial may be regarded as the pars pro toto representation of the entire animal.
Fig. 15: Late Antique and medieval crane finds (+) plotted on the distribution map
of geographical names related to crane in the Carpathian Basin and regions of
19th-century crane taming (1: Lake Fertő, 2: Mezőföld Plain, 3: Great Cumania,
4: Hortobágy Plain, 5: Sárrét Plain, 6: Szeged region).
After the onset of Christianity, animals continued to appear as attributes
for saints and apostles. As symbols, they were still used to represent visual and
textual shorthand for basic human qualities ranging widely from modesty to
jealousy. The line between different animal species as well as humans between
and animals was often delightfully and uninhibitedly blurred in the medieval
view of the world. Fantastic and grotesque creatures were just as real and important
in daily life as the cattle and pigs living side by side with the people who
relied on them for survival. Specific cultural attitudes, the qualities attributed to
animals, have a direct feedback on which animals were preferred for exploitation
in a given place and time and how they were used. Even today, it affects
how animal species are used, under what circumstances. These qualities, in turn,
have ultimately affected which bones end up in the archaeozoologist’s laboratory.
Conclusions
The past history of human-animal connections is ultimately about behavior
in a myriad of inter-related natural and cultural contexts, revealed in bits and
pieces from a variety of sources. Interdisciplinary approaches to historical
problems provide a form of checks on different kinds of sources as well as adding
new kinds of data. It goes without saying that recognition and interpretation
46
of special patterns in archaeozoological assemblages is heavily contingent on
use of contemporaneous written sources and images (fig. 16). Attempts to move
beyond calories to interpreting bones in light of the local economy as well as social
organization and affiliation is a growing trend in archeozoology (Van Neer
and Ervynck 1996; 2004; Ervynck 2004; Galik and Kunst 2004). Multidisciplinarity,
that is, the parallel analysis of written and iconographic sources is an indispensable
contribution to medieval archaeozoology.
.
Fig. 16: Diagram of the relationships between animal bones and other sources
of historical data in light of the main themes in animal studies.
Archaeozoology
Faunal Material/Sites, Recipe Books, Images in Context,
Charters (hunting, trade, agricultural policy), Religious rules
Bestiaries Natural Histories, Account books, Magical formulae
QUESTIONS
&Data
Butchering and
Food
Preparation
Status and
prestige
Interpreting
Economic
importance
Contextualizing the Bones – Species and skeletal elements
Attributes and
Symbols and
attitude
Trade and exchange in
animals and animal
products
Religious food
taboos, animal
sacrifice and
proscription
Leather,
Bone,
Antler and
Horn
working
Wool, Milk,
Draft & Manure
47
Acknowledgements
Photographs in this paper were taken by Krisztina Pálfay (Figs. 3, 9, 11, 12) and János
Gyarati (Fig. 13) whose kind help is herewith acknowledged. Research by László Bartosiewicz
was supported by Grant No. T047228 of the Hungarian National Research Fund
(OTKA).
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