Zooarchaeological evidence for livestock management in (earlier) Neolithic Europe: Outstanding questions and some limitations of current approaches

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With the increasingly routine recovery of faunal remains from archaeological excavations and zooarchaeological analysis of such assemblages by macroscopic and, more recently, biomolecular methods, we now have an unprecedented wealth of evidence for early European livestock management at local, regional and continental scales. We can identify broad geographical and temporal trends in the relative abundance, size and mortality patterns of different livestock species, and have more piecemeal evidence for their diet, mobility and seasonality of reproduction and for human exploitation of their secondary as well as primary products. Conversely, we have little if any direct zooarchaeological evidence for the scale of livestock management and this, coupled with disagreement regarding the intensity of secondary products usage, hinders consensus on the contribution of livestock to human subsistence in Neolithic Europe. It is proposed here that most domestic ruminants in Neolithic Europe were managed for non-specialised exploitation of a mixture of carcass and secondary products and, drawing on a range of indirect proxies, that livestock were mostly kept in small numbers. It follows that the direct dietary contribution of domestic animals to Neolithic human subsistence will normally have been subordinate to that of grain crops and secondary to their role in supporting cultivation and social dynamics. If these propositions are accepted, some recent attempts to interpret regional (and diachronic) variation in zooarchaeological evidence in terms of latitudinal contrasts in climate and vegetation may be ill-founded. In conclusion, it is argued that sound interpretation of the wealth of zooarchaeological data now available, as evidence for early European animal keeping, requires their integration with other lines of archaeological, bioarchaeological and palaeoecological investigation in the context of broader models of Neolithic subsistence, land use and political economy. The approach advocated, while illustrated with examples from Neolithic Europe, is of wider geographical relevance and, despite its critical tone, this assessment of the state of the field is essentially optimistic.