Each quarter, the Stanford Archaeology Center invites prominent archaeologists from around the globe to be in residence for a week as a Distinguished Lecturer. During their residency, the Distinguished Lecturer gives two lectures and interacts with faculty, postdoctoral scholars and students. The first distinguished lecture of the academic year,  the center will host Paul Halstead, PhD who is Emeritus Professor, Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Abstract

It was apparently normal for early farming communities in Europe to raise domestic animals as well as crops, but what was the importance of the former? Were they valued symbols of wealth or status, useful aids to crop husbandry, the centrepiece of commensal feasting, or a major (perhaps even predominant) source of subsistence? One serious obstacle to answering these questions is the difficulty of assessing the scale of early animal keeping. The available evidence for exploitation of early domestic animals in Europe has been greatly enriched in recent years in two complementary ways: first, by the accumulation of ‘traditional’ macroscopic zooarchaeological data of a quantity and geographical coverage sufficient to enable region- and continent-wide syntheses; and, secondly, by the explosion of relevant biomolecular analyses of animal and human bone/teeth, plant remains and food residues in pottery. Understanding of this wealth of data is severely handicapped, however, without evidence for the scale of animal keeping. This presentation reviews some of the varied lines of proxy evidence and circumstantial argument that have been used to address this issue. It concludes that these point towards early stock keeping on a generally small scale and explores the implications of such an outcome for some recent syntheses and for likely answers to the question posed above regarding the importance of early livestock in Europe.