Pastoralism in context

Abstract

Animal and crop husbandry were, beyond doubt, the backbone of the ancient Greek economy. Predominantly cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs fueled the domestic, market, and cult activities with their primary and secondary products, forming a vital part of the everyday life. However, historians and archaeologists have been debating for decades over the scale and degree of specialisation of animal husbandry. Textual evidence is fragmentary and biased, as it was written mostly by and for the urban educated upper classes, while the (zoo)archaeological evidence studied so far originates mostly from ritual contexts and is closely related to cult. As a response to these challenges, the current work combines an integrated approach combining standard zooarchaeological and innovative multi-stable isotopic (87Sr/86Sr, δ13C, δ18O) analyses to understand the role of animal husbandry in the domestic economies. This interdisciplinary study identified differences and similarities in animal management among Magoula Plataniotiki, New Halos, and Pherae, settlements of different political and economic importance in Thessaly, central Greece during the turbulent Classical and Hellenistic Periods (4th-1st century BCE). Intra-site variation in the degree of specialisation and lack of large-scale production regardless the importance of each site revealed that constant political instability halted the significant economic growth. As a result, animal husbandry had to adapt and target the small local markets rather than the larger markets of the large urban centres of this period.