Was the English medieval goat genuinely rare? A new morphometric approach provides the answer

Abstract

There are important gaps in the historical and archaeological evidence that have, so far, precluded us from reliably assessing the role of the goat in the English Middle Ages. This, in part, is the direct consequence of the absence of a methodology allowing the confident identification of sheep and goat bones. On the other hand, the fact that the goat has always been perceived as rare has led us to think that medieval goats did not deserve much attention. Thanks to a recently developed new morphometric approach, which allows taxonomic identifications to be based on more objective criteria and results to be scrutinised, we are provided with a new tool to re-assess the role that this species played in English medieval husbandry. This paper presents the results of the application of this new methodology on three archaeological medieval sheep/goat assemblages. Previous research suggested that the goat was not abundant in medieval England, but has also raised the possibility that this may be a consequence of an under-estimation by zooarchaeologists, due to identification difficulties. The basic outcome of our paper is to provide, for the first time, unambiguous evidence that the goat was genuinely uncommon. In the medieval archaeological record, sheep remains are overwhelmingly better represented than goat remains—all three case studies confirmed the pattern. Although these examples cannot be taken to represent the situation everywhere in the country, they provide clear-cut indication that the zoorchaeological interpretation of caprine remains from English medieval sites has so far been largely reliable. The three sites offer the opportunity to investigate different dimensions of the problem and to discuss the role of the goat in different contexts.