Archaeozoological approach to complexity: Animal remains from two metallurgical sites from the eastern and western corners of Europe

Abstract

Despite its importance in the study of subsistence economies and paleoenvironmental reconstruction, archaeozoology has very seldom played a prominent role in the study of technological development, one of the agencies underlying the unfolding of human history. The reasons for such a situation are manifold, but a recurring theme is that fauna remains essentially unmodifi ed in light of technological development, or, at least, that the signals it provides are not as clear as those provided by other archaeological items (Lyman, 1994; Antipina, 2004a). The subsistence system in the Bronze Age involved three fi elds – agriculture, animal breeding, and metallurgy. The fi rst two were not radically improved upon technologically for another few millennia. Metallurgy became the fi rst instance in human history in which a productive branch not directly connected with food production radically transformed the nature of both things and phenomena (Hauptmann, 1991; Chernykh, 1992). The origin and development of metallurgy in Western Europe was associated with a process of social complexity. The chronological coincidence of these processes has often been interpreted in terms of a cause-effect relationship that has gone uncontested in the course of time (see (The Origins…, 1995)). This model of social transformation is based on a series of propositions, the main ones being the following: