Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space 9781407315720, 9781407344881

Citation preview

Alice M. Choyke is Associate Professor in the medieval department of Central European University. She also teaches in the cultural heritage program of the same University. She is co-founder of the Medieval Animal Data-network (MAD) and the Worked Bone Research Group (WBRG) of the International Council of Archaeozoology (ICAZ). Gerhard Jaritz is Professor of Medieval Studies at Central European University. He is co-founder of the Medieval Animal Data-network (MAD). His main research interests are the history of medieval daily life and mentality, and the history of late medieval visual culture. Contributors: Briony Aitchison, László Bartosiewicz, Fiona Beglane, Luminita Bejenaru, Antonietta Buglione, Alice M. Choyke, Pam J. Crabtree, László Daróczi-Szabó, Márta DarócziSzabó, Giovanni De Venuto, Laura Fenelli, Gerhard Jaritz, Hrvoje Kekez, Günther Karl Kunst, Florin Leonte, Mark Maltby, Anu Mänd, Isabella Nicka, Terry O’Connor, Aleksander Pluskowski, Frank Salvadori, Barbara Sassi, Katalin Szende

9 781407 315720

CHOYKE & JARITZ (Eds)   ANIMALTOWN: BEASTS IN MEDIEVAL URBAN SPACE

________

BAR  S2858  2017  

Urban space constitutes a place where people and animals live together in close proximity with each other, creating changing landscapes of co-existence, conflict, mutual dependencies and exploitation. The medieval animals found in the articles of Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space appear in text and image, as well as archaeological find materials in the form of butchery waste, kitchen refuse, debris from manufacturing osseous objects, and the objects themselves. This multiplicity of sources sheds light on the ways towns fed themselves, protected themselves and created their personal landscapes and views of themselves through the power of metaphor and symbol involving the array of beasts, great and small, surrounding them. The general theme uniting the papers in this volume is the range of factors influencing the mutual relationship between humans and the animals that surrounded them within the densely built and occupied spaces created by people in towns and their hinterlands. Animals are found as urban symbols, decorative motifs and representations. They appear as key elements in food traditions and meat-processing, economic and trade structures, hygiene and disease, as well as craft activities that exploited a variety of animal products. Beasts of all kinds played many different roles in the lives of people in the Middle Ages, from the highest levels of society to the lowest of the low. Conversely, intimate contact with humans in these environments also shaped the lives and behaviour of both wild and domestic animals in many profound ways, both evident and subtle. The volume will be a valuable addition to the library of anyone interested in the connection between urban animals and people in medieval times.

Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space Edited by

Alice M. Choyke Gerhard Jaritz

BAR International Series 2858 B A R

2017

Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space Edited by

Alice M. Choyke Gerhard Jaritz

BAR International Series 2858 2017

by Published in BAR Publishing, Oxford BAR International Series Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space © The editors and contributors severally Labours of the Month: December. wall painting, beg. 15th c., Bohemian school. Trento (Italy), Castello Buonconsiglio, Torre Aquila. Photo: © Institut für Realienkunde of the University of Salzburg, Krems (Austria). The Authors’ moral rights under the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act are hereby expressly asserted. All rights reser ved. No par t of this work may be copied, reproduced, stored, sold, distributed, scanned, saved in any for m of digital for mat or transmitted in any for m digitally, without the written per mission of the Publisher.

ISBN 9781407315720 paperback ISBN 9781407344881 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9781407315720 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

BAR titles are available from: BAR Publishing Banbury Rd, Oxford, [email protected] + ( ) + ( ) www.barpublishing.com

,

Table of Contents List of Figures and Tables

v

Introduction Alice M. Choyke

1

Interpreting Urban Animal Contexts What Makes a Medieval Urban Animal Bone Assemblage Look Urban? Reflections on Feature Types and Recurrent Patterns from Lower Austria and Vienna Günther Karl Kunst

9

Like a Headless Chicken: Meaning, Medium and Context in Medieval Urban Taphonomy László Bartosiewicz

19

Horseflesh and Beaver Pelts: Aspects of Faunal Studies in Medieval Novgorod and its Region Mark Maltby

27

The Diet of Ipswich from the Middle Saxon through the Medieval Periods Pam J. Crabtree

35

Animals as Symbol and Urban Reality Dogs in Church Gerhard Jaritz

43

Pigs in Medieval Cities: Saint Anthony’s Unusual Attribute Laura Fenelli

52

Animals as Presents in Late-Medieval Livonia Anu Mänd

59

Norm and Practice and Urban Animals Oxen, Pigs and Sheep in the Medieval City: Analysis of Regulations Concerning Domestic Animals in Statutes of Medieval Dalmatian Towns Hrvoje Kekez

69

All the Priests’ Horses and all the Priests’ Hens…: Animals in the Households of Late Medieval Hungarian Urban Clergy Katalin Szende

77

“Drunkenness is the mother of forgetfulness, anger causes injuries”: Animal Welfare in Late-Medieval English Urban Society Briony Aitchison

85

Suburban Husbandry: Animals in the Landscape of Trim, County Meath, Ireland Fiona Beglane

94

Domestic and Wild Animals in Urban Settings Faunal Exploitation Patterns in Urban Settlements in Medieval Moldavia Luminita Bejenaru

103

Animals in Medieval Urban Lives: York as a Case Study Terry O’Connor

115

iii

Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space Animals in Italian Medieval Towns: From Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages Frank Salvadori

129

Urban Jungle? Wild Mammals in Medieval Towns Aleksander Pluskowski

146

Animals and the Urban Elite What is a Peacock Doing in a Medieval City? Analysing Visual Representations of Animals in Urban Space in the Late Middle Ages Isabella Nicka

161

“... For I have brought to you the fugitive animals of the desert”: Animals and Representations of the Constantinopolitan Imperial Authority in Two Poems by Manuel Philes Florin Leonte

179

Zooarchaeological Research from an Elite Urban Building in Medieval Durrës (Albania) Antonietta Buglione, Giovanni De Venuto and Barbara Sassi

188

Meat Consumption by the Christian Population in the Buda Castle Town District in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries László Daróczi-Szabó and Márta Daróczi-Szabó

196

List of Contributors

207

iv

List of Figures and Tables Contribution Kunst Fig. 1: Excavation area in Tulln (Lower Austria), Landesfeuerwehrschule 17 Fig. 2: Tulln, Landesfeuerwehrschule: bone assemblage from a pit from the late medieval kiln and workshop area 17 Fig. 3: Bone assemblage from a high-late medieval layer from the Platz am Hof in Vienna 18 Fig. 4: Stratigraphic sequence at the excavation Landesfeuerwehrzentrale/Am Hof 18 Contribution Bartosiewicz Fig. 1: Rudolf Carl Virchow 24 Fig. 2: Archaeozoological aspects of biostratonomy 24 Fig. 3: The relationships between physical, chemical and biological factors of fossil diagenesis 25 Fig. 4: Dogs fighting over animal bones in the picture by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (detail) 25 Fig. 5: Detail on the sarcophagus of Maria de Vilalobos in Lisbon 25 Fig. 6: The biostratonomy of written sources 26 Contribution Maltby Fig. 1: Map showing the location of Novgorod 32 Fig. 2: Plan of medieval Novgorod showing the locations of excavations 33 Table 1: Elements of horse and beaver from Troitsky Sites IX-XI, Novgorod 34 Contribution Crabtree Fig. 1: Map of East Anglia showing the location of Ipswich 38 Fig. 2: Species ratios (based on NISP) for Middle Saxon Ipswich 39 Fig. 3: Age profile for Middle Saxon cattle from Ipswich 39 Fig. 4: Species ratios based on NISP for Middle Saxon Ipswich, Brandon, and Wicken Bonhunt 39 Fig. 5: Species ratios based on NISP for the Middle Saxon, Early and Middle Late Saxon, and early medieval fauna from Ipswich 40 Fig. 6: Scatter plot showing the distribution of the distal breadth (Bd) vs. the greatest length (GL) for cattle metacarpals from Middle Saxon Ipswich 40 Fig. 7: Withers’ height distributions for Middle Saxon and early medieval cattle from Ipswich 40 Contribution Jaritz Fig. 1: Dog in Church. ©: Wendell Schloneger, 2007 48 48 Fig. 2: Disturbances in church, metal etching. Strasburg, end of the 15 th c. Fig. 3: Woman in church with her lapdog 49 Fig. 4: Young men in church with falcon and dog 49 Fig. 5: On the way to church with dogs and a hunting bird 50 Fig. 6: On the way to church, copper plate, Israhel van Meckenem, 1495 50 Fig. 7: The dog in church at the occasion of the desecration of a host 51 Fig. 8: The communion of the proud knight in the parish church of Seefeld, panel painting, c. 1500 51 Contribution Fenelli Fig. 1: Bernardino Lanzani, Saint Anthony and the city of Pavia, detached fresco, 1522. Pavia, S. Teodoro 58 Contribution Szende Table 1: Animals and animal-based products, abstract from the 1394 toll tariff in Sopron 84 Table 2: Animals mentioned in last wills 84 Contribution Beglane Fig. 1: Map of Ireland showing Trim 98 98 Fig. 2: Excavation plan 99 Fig. 3: Pig mandible with excessive wear on first molar Fig. 4: Pig mandible with infection and ante-mortem tooth loss 99 Table 1: NISP and (MNI) values by phase 100 Table 2: Percentage MNI by phase for three main domesticates 100 Contribution Bejenaru Fig. 1: Map of medieval Moldavia showing the urban settlements where archaeozoological analyses have been carried out 108 Fig. 2: Seal of the medieval city of Baia showing a beheaded red deer 108 Fig. 3: General plan of the town of Orheiul Vechi 109 Fig. 4: Percentages of domestic animal remains in the assemblages 109 Fig. 5a: Proportions of cattle, pig, caprine bones (sheep-goat) (NR) 109 Fig. 5b: Proportions of cattle, pig, caprine bones (sheep-goat) (MNI) 110 Fig. 6: Relative frequencies of horse 110

v

Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space Fig. 7a: Relative frequencies of immature/mature (% MNI) for domestic cattle in Baia 110 Fig. 7b: Relative frequencies of immature/mature (% MNI) for domestic cattle in Siret 111 Fig. 7c: Relative frequencies of immature/mature (% MNI) for domestic cattle in Targu Trotus 111 Fig. 7d: Relative frequencies of immature/mature (% MNI) for domestic cattle in Orheiul Vechi 111 Fig. 8: Sex distributions for adult domestic cattle, based on metapodials (% NR) 112 Fig. 9: Relative frequencies of immature/mature (MNI) for domestic pig bones 112 Fig. 10: Relative frequencies of immature/mature (MNI) for caprine bones (sheep-goat) 112 Fig. 11: Objects for domestic use from fourteenth to fifteenth centuries: 1-5 – knives; 6 – chopper 113 Fig. 12: Emblem of Moldova with an aurochs head 113 Table 1: Relative frequencies of wild mammals 114 Contribution O’Connor Table 1: Relative abundance of major mammal taxa based on % NISP of hand-collected material 126 Table 2: Cattle mandibles by broad age groups 127 Fig. 1: A swarm of medieval pits flooded by summer rain at the Hungate site, York 128 Contribution Salvadori Fig. 1: Territorial G.I.S. platform – Number of animal finds by region 139 Fig. 2: Archaeozoological sample from Italian urban contexts 140 Fig. 3: Territorial G.I.S. platform – a) Cities with the presence of salt-water gastropoda; b) Cities with the presence of salt-water bivalves; c) Cities with the presence of salt-water bony fish; d) Cities with the presence of fresh-water fish 141 Fig. 4: Territorial G.I.S. platform – a) Cities with the presence of wild ungulates; b) Cities with the presence of wild anseriformes; c) Cities with the presence of columbiformes; d) Cities with the presence of passeriforme 142 Fig. 5: Territorial G.I.S. platform – a) Cities with the presence of camelidae and leopard; b) Cities with the presence of brown bear; c) Cities with the presence of domestic mammals; d) Cities with the presence of rat 143 Table 1: Sites with sparrowhawk remains (Accipiter nisus L. 1758) 144 Table 2: Cities with brown bear remains (Ursus arctos L. 1758) 144 Table 3: Sites with a more than 100 fragments of pig or sheep/goat and more than 40% concentration within the entire animal bone assemblage 144 Table 4: Cities with black-rat or rat remains (Rattus rattus L. 1758; Rattus) 145 Contribution Pluskowski Fig. 1: Detail from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government (Siena, 1338-40) 156 Fig. 2: Misericord with carving of cat and mouse (Winchester Cathedral, 1308-10) 157 Fig. 3: Brown bear feeding on urban waste in Brasov, July 2007 157 Contribution Nicka Table 1: Examples of the use of the peacock motive in visual representations 169-71 Table 2: Archaeological findings of peacock bones, their dates and finding contexts 172 Fig. 1: Hans Memling, Passion of Christ (detail) 173 Fig. 2: Flemish artist, Charles the Bold receives the book, ca. 1450–1500 174 Fig. 3: Master of the Tiburtine Sibyl, Raising of Lazarus 175 176 Fig. 4: Unknown Master, The Meeting of Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate 177 Fig. 5: Rogier van der Weyden and workshop, Dream of Pope Sergius, ca. 1440 Fig. 6: Unknown Master, Ecce homo 178 Fig. 7: Detail of fig. 6 178 Contribution Buglione, De Venuto, and Sassi Fig. 1: The Roman amphitheatre in the urban context of Durrës 191 Fig. 2: The amphitheatre of Durrës: schematic plan of the main excavated areas (2004-2007) 191 Fig. 3: The medieval palace of Durrës 192 Fig. 4: Percentages of the identified and unidentified bone fragments within the total sample 192 Fig. 5: Percentages of the identified and unidentified bone fragments in the medieval faunal sample 193 Fig. 6: The species composition of the medieval faunal sample 193 Fig. 7: Mortality curve for caprines 193 Fig. 8: Mortality histogram for caprines 194 Fig. 9: Percentages of sheep versus goat bone remains 194 Fig. 10: Mortality histogram for pigs 194 Fig. 11: Percentages of boar and sow bone remains 195 Fig 12: Distributions by skeletal element of caprines remains 195 Fig. 13: Distributions by skeletal elements of pig remains 195 Contribution L. and M. Daróczi-Szabó Fig. 1: Buda Castle and the excavated area 201

vi

List of Figures and Tables Fig. 2: The excavations (A-B: Szent György Square, C: Kings Palace, northern forecourt, D: Csikós courtyard ) Table 1: Species represented in the faunal assemblage recovered from Buda castle Table 2: The age distribution of cattle bones Table 3: The minimum number of individuals of the most important species Table 4: The bones of cattle, sheep/goat, pig and horse, categorised according to the value of their meat Table 5: Numbers of cattle, sheep/goat, pig and horse bones with cut marks Table 6: The size of the both-end cut ribs from three excavations (Auchan Aquincum: 2nd –3th century Roman period, Szent György tér and Csikós udvar: 14th –15th century, Szendrő Felsővár: 17th century)

vii

202 202 203 203 203-04 204-05 206

Introduction Alice M. Choyke

Department of Medieval Studies Central European University

Urban space constitutes a place where people and animals live together in close proximity with each other creating changing landscapes of co-existence, conflict, mutual dependencies and exploitation. Medieval animals appear in text and image as well as archaeological find materials in the form of butchery, kitchen refuse, and debris from manufacturing osseous objects, and the objects themselves. This multiplicity of sources shed light on the ways towns fed themselves, protected themselves and created their personal landscapes and views of themselves through the power of metaphor and symbol involving the array of beasts, great and small, surrounding them.

food traditions and meat-processing, economic and trade structures, hygiene and disease as well as craft activities that exploited a variety of animal products. Beasts of all kinds played many different roles in the lives of medieval people from the highest levels of society to the lowest of the low. Conversely, intimate contact with humans in these environments also shaped the lives and behaviour of both wild and domestic animals in many profound ways, both evident and subtle. All these factors and many others revolving around the animal – human relationship in the close confines of various kinds of towns and cities across Europe from Late Antiquity to Early Modern times directly or indirectly shaped the lives and experiences of the populations inhabiting the constantly shifting and changing topography of towns.

Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space comprises peer-reviewed papers based on a conference held in 2008, “Fauna and Medieval Urban Space,” at the Medieval Studies Department of the Central European University and organized by the editors, Alice Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz. The goal of the conference was to highlight features of the entangled nature of the animal-human relationships found within the complex structures of different kinds of urban space. Some towns and cities in Europe had highly developed infra-structures surrounded by walls that created barriers between suburbia and their hinterlands. Other towns were more open with blurred topographic boundaries. Variations on these two extremes of urban living can be found at different times and different geographic regions.

The towns and cities discussed in the papers of this volume are also extremely variable. From densely built-in spaces such as Paris or Nuremberg to the more loosely built urban conglomerations of Scandinavia or in the kingdom of Hungary, the rules for dealing with animals on a daily and seasonal basis necessarily differed. Regulations concerning animal keeping and their slaughter had to be stricter and more elaborated in urban centers with expensive and developed infrastructure which could be damaged by animal activity. The animals that were brought into or lived in these cities were closely experienced and understood in a variety of ways that was dependent on multifold restrictions and possibilities inherent to urban space.

The papers in this volume are concerned with a whole range of human-animal interactions within urban space seen through the prism of data sets coming from texts, images and archaeozoology in some multidisciplinary combination. The nature of those multifarious interactions is dependent on shifting definitions of what is urban both for scholars today and in the minds of the medieval occupants of urban and suburban space. Urban centers are often associated first in historical thought with architecture, topography and political power. Over the past twenty years, however, an increasing number of studies have shown that bilateral influences between the human occupants of these towns and their immediate hinterland and various environmental factors frequently played key roles in shaping the history and space of Late Antique and medieval urban centers.

The first section of the volume concerns the question of what constitutes an urban zooarchaeological deposit from the medieval period. The question is closely intertwined with the nature of medieval and post-medieval urban space and the way bones were differentially deposited, preserved, moved and researched. The paper by Karl Kunst reviews the faunal evidence from urban and highstatus medieval sites in Austria. In the first place, the substantial built architecture of medieval towns such as Vienna provided large areas for dumping refuse leading to great accumulation of animal bones from mixed activities. Indeed, Kunst shows that the interpretation of such faunal remains loses much of its power if the nature of the find context is not also taken into consideration, a theme also taken up by László Bartosiewicz. The latter continues the discussion of the impact of bone deposition studies, inspired here by a high status burial monument showing a small lapdog eating chicken parts from a medieval urban setting in Portugal. Another problem, however, is that such contexts have not been intensively studied compared to the situation with the much better researched Roman faunal materials or even what is

The general theme uniting the papers in this volume includes the range of factors influencing the mutual relationship between humans and the animals that surrounded them within the densely built and occupied spaces created by people in towns and their hinterlands. Animals are found as urban symbols, decorative motifs and representations. Animals appear as key elements in

1

Alice M. Choyke available from post-medieval proveniences. Some urban animal consumption trends are nevertheless clear. In Central European regions, for instance, the consumption of sheep and goat decreased in popularity and cattle grew in importance in parallel with the expansion of the cattle trade from Hungary and northern Italy.

and text – providing exemplars of proper social norms and showing ways to reduce the potential for conflict. In his paper, Gerhard Jaritz shows that the dog, as close companion to people, is an animal that can be frequently found transgressing the boundaries of appropriate behaviour in terms of barking and dirty habits. Some of the dogs found in texts and images are stray and some are fancy pets brought to church by their ostentatious owners as a status marker. Dogs found in the wrong place appear as part of a bouquet of social transgressions including gossip and attendance to secular matters in what should be holy place, the confines of a church during the service. During the late Middle Ages, there are regular commentaries on these human failures across the religious spectrum including allowing dogs in church.

The waterlogged early medieval Russian town of Novgorod in western Russia provides the background for another taphonomic discussion by Mark Maltby on the way bones in this kind of urban context are deposited and survive. Despite fantastic preservation, excavation strategy precluded detailed horizontal discussion of how bones from different domestic and wild species were distributed. Excavation strategy also has a taphonomic impact on find materials including animal bone. Here, Maltby considers the differential treatment of the bodies of two species, one domestic and one wild, and of varying size and use, the horse and the beaver. Horse, while not common in the faunal material from excavations at Novgorod, was certainly skinned. The butchery marks present on the bones also indicate that sometimes horse was also butchered for its meat on individual properties despite not appearing on birch-bark documents as a meat animal. Textual sources tend to be normative while archaeological data directly reflects consumption as it actually took place. Beaver bone, on the other hand, despite its regular appearance in texts as a critical resource in pan-European trade for its pelt, does not really appear in this urban cultural context. To find material evidence for this trade, the author turns to the contemporary early medieval settlement at Minino on the edge of the Novgorod lands. Here, beaver and other animals hunted for their pelts also contributed to the meat economy of this non-urban settlement. The textual and zooarchaeological materials, thus, complement each other.

Other animals that appear often in medieval images and commentary are the pigs found in restricted urban space where they caused damage to property and humans alike – not even speaking of their somewhat dirty (from the human point of view) habits connected to what they were willing to eat. Although pigs are often used as a negative example, there is one positive pig, complete with a little bell around its neck, appearing as an attribute of the Hospitaller Order of friars of the fourth-century desert father, St. Anthony, the Antonites. Laura Fenelli notes that although rules and restrictions aimed at reducing conflict abound in the late Middle Ages about keeping pigs, especially in the close confines of densely built up towns with good infrastructures, this belled St. Anthony pig was allowed to run freely in urban space without risk of being killed. Pigs supplied fat for the ointment used in treating the skin disease called St. Anthony’s Fire, caused by ergot poisoning from eating products made from rye infected by a toxic fungus. Hence, images of this pig, appearing in an unexpected urban context, reflect a positive animal found in towns, symbolising the good works and holy powers of the Antonite Order.

While different kinds of foodstuffs and raw materials were brought to towns and cities, the waste from their consumption and exploitation would never have been removed at the same rate, resulting in large, mixed accumulations, including bone. However, some bone has a better chance at survival, bird bones tend to be underrepresented because they are more fragile and can be eaten by both humans and various carnivores/omnivores often found roaming the streets, such as dogs, cats and pigs. Taphonomic research, that is, the science of what parts of living creatures survive from the past and why they can be used to create an epistemological framework for integrating textual, iconographic and archaeozoological data, proves relevant to many aspects of medieval urban life.

Other animals, out of place in urban space as exotics, could also stand for reciprocal diplomatic relations between members of elite society. As gifts, special animals could be used to seal and reinforce power relationships. Anu Mänd reports on animals in elite gift-giving in three towns in Livonia (today’s Estonia and Latvia) between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. These specially chosen beasts were meant to be gifted in public urban space as material expressions of connections between rulers both within and without medieval Livonian society. Most of these beastly gifts were not the usual animal exotica coming from places like the Near East or Africa but were nevertheless special animals reflecting the financial possibilities of the ruler. Gifts ranged from elk (Alces alces) given in urban contexts but coming from local forest environments to other non-local deer species that had to be imported from areas to the south. Very expensive horses were also recorded as being gifted from and received by rulers in town. These animals were deliberately transported through the town providing both spectacle as well as appropriate gifts for Christian rulers. Beaver pelts, unguents made from their castor glands, and scaly beaver tails as fasting food delicacies would also

The next group of papers deals with the interplay between the symbolic use of animals in medieval towns and cities and their actual appearance in these urban contexts. When animals appear in places where they do not belong they can cause both chaos (negative) or be used to emphasize particular sets of social relations as in gift-giving (positive). Upsets can be used to draw moral lessons about good and bad behaviour for the local population in image 2

Introduction have been welcome and value gifts for elites reigning outside Livonia. However, other special animals, either alive or as meals, but all expensive and difficult to procure, such as sea mammals or the then exotic turkey could all appear as gifts presented before an audience in public ceremonies and reflecting recognition of the prestige, power and status of the rulers who gave the gifts and received them.

Fiona Beglane deals with the way animals were kept in the hinterland of medieval walled Irish towns on long plots of land. Unlike the articles based on textual or image sources, her results are rather based on faunal materials from archaeological excavations. Faunal data directly reflect consumption patterns at particular moments in the life of a community. They are neither normative nor connected to specific individuals. Domestic animals of all kinds were kept on these suburban plots to be brought into town markets later for sale and slaughter. The appearance of foetal pig bones in the outskirts of town suggest that pigs may even have been raised close to the town. Alternatively these bones may represent the remains of suckling pigs eaten at feasts. Goat appears chiefly in the form of horn-cores and may represent craft waste from horn working. Dog bones are rare although many bones show signs of gnawing suggesting that dogs ran unregulated through the town outskirts although they seem to have been increasingly controlled as the proportion of gnawed bones steadily decreases over time. Still, most of the meat from within town came from cattle which were certainly reared in the hinterland of the town and reflects the trend of raising animals there and concentrating on craft-activities in urban space.

While some animals were singled out because they represented exceptions in urban space other medieval records reflect the rules and regulations imposed on animals normally encountered in the towns and cities of medieval Europe. Such statutes were aimed at reducing areas of conflict between humans and animals in the close confines of urban space while attempting to maximize economic benefit. Hrvoje Kekez reports on the variety of ways animals appearing in the selfgoverning statutes of medieval Dalmatian communes and their outskirts were regulated from the thirteenth century on. These statutes mostly concern sheep and pigs which in some towns could not be kept within the city walls except on market day in the case of sheep or pigs in pigsties on feast days. Donkeys and horse were not regulated although the dung they produced had to be carried by the owners outside the town walls. Statutes also regulated what animals were permitted to be sold at market and where. Regulations concerning animals kept in the city district were aimed at reducing tensions between shepherds and farmers with crops by designating where animals could be grazed or not. Statues also concerned the fines imposed for theft of different kinds of animals as well as the variety of damages they could cause in town.

Other papers dealing with zooarchaeological materials explore the exploitation and unrecorded presence of domestic and wild animals in other towns with less dense infrastructures and where the main data on animals comes from archaeological animal bone finds. Luminita Bejanaru describes the situation in the towns of Eastern Romania and neighbouring Moldavia where the boundaries between urban space, characterized by concentrations of power and economic activities connected to regional polities, were blurred by intensive connections to their hinterlands. Inhabitants of this kind of town actively raised animals and practiced agriculture. However, relatively little zooarchaeological work has been carried out on medieval urban centres in the region, mostly by the author of this paper. The textual source material connected to animal production and consumption is also scanty, so the information contained in this paper is particularly welcome. Cattle clearly is the most important meat animal although at the fourteenth-century Mongol town of Orheiul Vechi in today’s Republic of Modavia there are elements in the diet that point to ethnic and religious differences in the livestock structures.

Another way animals were regulated between individuals in urban space was as moveable goods mentioned and bequeathed in the plentiful last wills from three towns in Hungary. Katalin Szende describes the situation as both lay testators as well as testators from the lower clergy began the task of reorganizing their households before death. Animals were used as personal bequests to people who were close to them, from relatives to housekeepers and friends. Animals in this context reflect the web of personal connections rather than the public display of power represented by official gift giving seen in Mänd’s contribution or the general regulations on animals found in urban statutes. Briony Aitchison also explores the more personal side of human-animal connections on the other side of Europe in late medieval English society. There are records of small-holders who cured their own animals or sought outside medical help for the beasts they depended on for survival. There are even more records of elites who employed people within the household to explicitly care for animals who were close to them, especially hunting birds, hunting dogs and horses. Horses were considered so valuable that outside specialists, strangely often of lower status, could also be called in to care for them. Information for curing animals came from formal textual authorities in this period although experience was also considered critical.

In contrast to the loosely structured towns of Eastern Europe, the key city of York in northern England is walled with a densely built infrastructure and a complex market economy. Terry O’Connor’s paper seeks to understand the role of animals in the fabric of daily life in medieval towns through the lens of York’s densely occupied and built-up environment. Animals in York were fundamental to many aspects of daily life from food and craft-activities to representation and metaphoric expression. At the same time, animals connected the town to its hinterland where they were largely produced and brought to town for sale. Animal bones recovered from medieval towns represent a wide range of entangled meanings from the mundane to the realm of traditional 3

Alice M. Choyke and sacred notions of how the world should be properly run and structured. All these factors directly affect what and how faunal remains are found in archaeological medieval urban contexts. Conversely, the way animals react to human attitudes and resulting behaviour affect their appearance in the archaeological record as well.

portant metaphor for attempts to control dangerous and encroaching wilderness through the sixteenth century. At night, however, the wild took over within the city with an unseen and somewhat threatening nocturnal animal world becoming active within and without walled cities. One part of the population with significantly more control over parts of this ambiguous animal world were the urban elite who had to insure the supply of any kind of animals they wished to exploit in menageries and other display and even as food, like peacocks. The bones of this avian species and its representations are often depicted in city contexts. Isabelle Nicka points out that the presence of these large, exotic birds, certainly not native to natural European environments, marks the presence of elites in urban space. Peacocks were not only decorative and loud, raucously announcing their presence around luxurious town dwellings, but their meat was eaten during feasts and their feathers provided decoration for the clothing and houses of the upper classes in urban society. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, their depiction in images came increasingly to represent a critical metaphor for vanity and pride.

Frank Salvatore provides us with yet another view of the mutual complexity of the human-animal relationships in an important general survey of nineteen urban settings dating from Late Antiquity to late medieval times in Italy. The diachronic distribution of salt water shellfish reflects the decline of the Roman city, something paralleled in the fragmented structures of early medieval towns and later the rise of the late medieval city in terms of demand reflected in the revival of trade networks concerned with luxury goods. Bony salt-water fish remain common in coastal cities, however, and fresh water fish can be found everywhere in early urban space. This emphasis on fish consumption is connected to the spread of Christianizing culture with prohibitions on eating meat on numerous fasting and feast days. Although game meat from wild ungulates seems to have been limited, antler was gathered in quantities for craft-work. Like salt water mussels, the remains of capercaille bird bones can be found in urban settings very far from their natural habitats as luxury food. Early medieval sites also see the presence of raptors used in hunting as well as exotic animals such as dromedary and leopard. Generally, pork consumption declines over time in favour of mutton. This study takes a broad view of animal use and consumption over time and space and shows the important role zooarchaeology can play in the understanding of the particularities and variability in medieval daily life.

The world of an elite literati-class was especially prominent in Byzantine Constantinople. Animals and their symbolic connections to humans were clearly expressed in the study of and the commentary on the late antique Physiologus during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Such texts, used to allegorize and critique social debate in Byzantine society, were widely read by members of the Constantinopolitan elite. Florin Leone focuses on two works by one particular author, Manuel Philes (1294-1334), one of the most prolific writers in the Palaiologan period. He came early into the intellectual and political circles of the Constantinopolitan court, mostly as imperial legate, in the service of Emperor Andronikos II. A small but significant part of his literary output is concerned with the natural world and especially animals. His works were meant to be performative, presumably in front of other literati at the imperial court. Animals in late Byzantium appear as metaphors for the intellectual and the political setting of their time and place. At the same time they represented a nostalgic look back to the glorious days of the Byzantine court when emperors received and could afford to give gifts in the form of valuable big game animals destined for the royal menagerie.

Aleks Pluskowski explores the idea of medieval towns as central places incorporated in various social networks. Towns had legally and materially expressed boundaries, often in the form of walls. Medieval life within these walls comprised a kaleidoscope of sights, a cacophony of sounds and an intense smell world, which combined, through rules, produced a predictable and proper civic world within its sharp conceptual dichotomy between urban and rural environments. Of course, the simple need to bring rural products like animals into the urban setting already began to blur this legally sharp boundary. The urban environment also encouraged colonization by a diverse group of animals not directly connected to human diet and crafts including special types of insects, birds, small mammals and larger beasts as well. All these animals, especially rats and mice, were attracted to the high density of food waste and became part of trophic chains separate from human food chains. These beasts formed an inextricable part of the mosaic of urban living that was outside direct human control and created part of the mental landscape of urban environments. Cats appear in urban space to control rodents and also as both ad hoc and regularized sources of fur. But cats, roaming at night, were also part of the ambiguous and fluid category of pets under partial human control. Descriptions of wolves, the wild cousins of dogs, attacking town walls and the domestic livestock supplying the town, remained an im-

Elites are also represented in zooarchaeological assemblages from two other medieval settings, in the old Roman amphitheatre in Durrës, Albania, and the royal castle in Buda, Hungary. Antonietta Buglione, Giovanni de Venuto, and Barbara Sassi report on different aspects of the animal bones from the palace levels of the Albanian site, representing food debris from an elite occupation dating from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The faunal assemblage comprised mainly caprine bones (that is sheep or goat bones) with some cattle and pig as well as a few cat and dog bones and scattered salt water molluscs. There seems to have been very little hunting of red and roe deer by residents of the palace. The exploit4

Introduction ation of animals appears to have concentrated on caprines as meat animals. Cattle were typically eaten only when they became too old to be used for work. The patterns found at this site seem consistent with what has been found at other urban centres in Montenegro and Apulia. The royal castle of Buda was both a fortress and an elite dwelling space. László Daróczi-Szabó describes the late medieval material from a castle courtyard complex filled with bone debris derived from various activities, especially cooking, dining and craftwork. Cattle provided the most important source of meat followed by caprines and pigs as well as some poultry. There is also some evidence that game was occasionally on the menu. Although fish was important as well in the diet of Christian elites, the lack of fine excavation methods means that their bones were largely overlooked. The animals in the pages of this volume take many guises. However, all were living, breathing creatures that humans around them thought about in different ways. These creatures were vital elements in the everyday life of urban dwellers across Europe from early medieval to early modern times. Animal bones appear in archaeological materials, animal images can be found in sacred and secular books as well as in wall-paintings. Beasts also play a role in many kinds of sacred, legal, and narrative textual sources. These different texts contain a spectrum of information and data that is sometimes difficult to reconcile with material remains in truly interdiscipliary research. Often, people interested in the manifold animalhuman nexus are driven to using parallel lines of evidence, obtaining results that may even be in outright contradiction with each other. The goal of this volume is not to resolve these complex hermeneutic issues but to show the many ways we can think about and play with the notion of beasts in urban settings, shedding new light on the lives of people and animals in the Middle Ages.

5

Interpreting Urban Animal Contexts

What Makes a Medieval Urban Animal Bone Assemblage Look Urban? Reflections on Feature Types and Recurrent Patterns from Lower Austria and Vienna Günther Karl Kunst

VIAS Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science Institute of Palaeontology University of Vienna Abstract: The relationships and interdependencies between the accumulation of specific animal bone assemblages as well as urban site formation processes in general are discussed along with case studies from Austria. Many accumulations result primarily from different stages of urban reconstruction. Their retrieval is almost exclusively linked to rescue excavations. Keywords: Animal remains, Inn, Latrine, Monastic diet, Urban site formation Introduction From the Roman period onwards, animal bone materials from European urban settings have raised interest among scholars. This is certainly due to the fact that the urban situation, characterised by a high density of consumers and financial power on one side and spatial constraints on the other, saw the accumulation of significant amounts of domestic rubbish, including animal remains. Under favourable taphonomic conditions, this urban rubbish appeared in the archaeological record and built up within certain contexts, normally connected to human building activities and other types of cultural interferences with the geological environment. The resulting stratigraphy can appear rather complex and is often characterized by frequent intrusions, as the earlier layers may have been cut by younger features, so that, mixing of materials from different periods within a single context is common. More than in other situations and periods, the analysis of medieval bone assemblages depends on sound documentation of the archaeological features and the subsequent study of the artefacts. If this condition is guaranteed, a whole series of issues connected to economic and social development as well as urban-rural relations can be approached, and the data can be properly situated within the urban topography (see, e.g., the papers presented in Serjeantson and Waldron 1989). As archaeological research within still populated towns is largely determined by the needs of modern urban engineering and development, it normally takes place during rescue excavations, and animal bone specialists may encounter a variety of possible situations. The study materials may come from single contexts or from sites with complex stratigraphies; they may comprise a series of various assemblages from large construction sites (e.g. Meniel and Arbogast 1989). Under favourable conditions, syntheses from various excavations from a single locality (Bartosiewicz 1995) and regional compilations (Clavel 2001) become possible, not to mention research situations where urban archaeozoology becomes institutionalised

as is the case for the town of York in Great Britain (e.g. Bond & O’Connor 1999). A handbook, especially designed for the analysis of zoological remains within urban situations, was written by O’Connor (2003). State of research in Austria – an overview The investigations of medieval urban sites, normally situated beneath modern constructions in town centres, present particular difficulties. For logistic reasons, excavations in urban cores in Austria are not regularly carried out by universities or similar research institutes, but rather by cultural heritage management (BDA) bodies, by associated units or by private firms or institutions such as the Stadtarchäologie Wien (Urban Archaeology Vienna). Practically all work is done during the course of rescue excavations, with skilled teams and often involving dangerous working conditions. Due to this strong connection with development and building engineering, developing a scientific research plan is almost impossible and urban archaeology has to make the best of a chancy situation. The research outlook may be quite different in site types like castles, abandoned villages and some monasteries, where economic pressure, otherwise demanding a tight schedule for the research activities, is less dominant. Thus, unlike modern city centres, archaeological activities can more often be planned over the longterm. In some early medieval hilltop settlements in remote rural areas of Lower Austria, for instance, research excavations have gone on for years or even decades, and are undertaken by universities or other research institutions. The size of the area investigated archaeologically may be a critical factor in itself. Usually small on building sites, trench size may hinder proper interpretation of archaeological features. Consequently, large excavation areas within urban settings are more often found in the

9

Günther Karl Kunst peripheral parts of small towns, whereas in the densely settled city cores, small, discontinuous trenches are the rule. A recent synthesis by Kronberger (2005) on the topography of Roman cemeteries and civil settlements in the area of today’s Vienna, for instance, had to rely on scattered archaeological evidence accumulated over the course of the last 150 years. In a way, urban rescue excavations may be the opposite image of excavations connected with, e.g., highway construction, where very large areas are uncovered and become accessible for archaeological investigations, normally revealing prehistoric or early historic settlements.

Roman sites are not covered by modern settlements. Thus, in the case of urban Roman centres such as Carnuntum (Lower Austria) and Lauriacum (Upper Austria) long-term excavations, modern geophysical surveys and working-out of a detailed topography have all been made possible. Apart from these merely “structural” advantages, there is also a strong scholarly tradition in Austrian Roman provincial research dating back to the nineteenth century. Thus, even scattered finds from urban building sites have long attracted attention, whereas medieval strata and artefacts, lying on top of them, were neglected or even discarded until fairly recently, when medieval archaeology became an accepted academic discipline.

This deficit in research area size is largely compensated for by the density and concentration of finds in medieval and, above all, urban settings. Judging by the simple quantity of find material recovered during the last years in the area of eastern Austria, the medieval and the early post-medieval remain among the less well known periods. In addition, due to the lack of funding and specialists, it is impossible to keep pace with a constantly growing corpus of artefacts and ecofacts. Storage problems and decisions of what should be kept and what, if anything, can be thrown away, provoke ongoing discussions among the scientific community. The implementation of large, centralized depots, an option chosen both by the BDA and the province of Lower Austria, entails its own logistic and administrative challenges. Thus, in the present situation, selection and emphasizing some sites and contexts over others becomes a necessity. In the following pages, I present an overview of some urban bone materials from Vienna and Lower Austria, analysed over the last years.

Furthermore, regarding archaeozoology in the Roman era, some research questions appear more clear-cut than in the preceding or later periods. One field of interest concerns colonisation processes such as the impact of Romanisation on animal husbandry, for example the introduction of new breeds and how the animal bone record testifies to it. Another established approach is the inter-site comparison of, more or less, contemporary settlements possessing different social and economic functions. Rural sites (villae rusticae, small villages), towns, military establishments and their secondary agglomerations (vici) may all produce different types of “animal bone fall-out”. In theory, such an approach appears promising for faunal material from the Middle Ages as well, but here the archaeological record is more scattered and discontinuous. For example, most castles may antedate urban assemblages, and the rural record is very scarce. The same holds true for intra-site comparison, which again depends on uncovering large areas. In the civil town of Carnuntum (Lower Austria), for example, a recently excavated street section revealed an almost continuous stratigraphy comprising over 200 years of urban history (Radbauer and Humer 2004). In this case, two specifically Roman ways of engineering enhanced the build-up of important bone assemblages: the repeated renewal of the street surface produced a rising, almost tell-like, structure, and the sanitary system, integrated into the street itself, allowed the accumulation of various types of autochthonous sediments. In the absence of sophisticated sanitary and sewer systems, such sedimentary sequences normally do not appear in medieval urban settings, at least not in Central Europe. Moving on to the post-medieval, i.e., to the Early Modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), this time may have suffered even more from neglect by an academic tradition focussing on “proper” archaeological eras such as prehistory or Roman antiquity. Nevertheless, the archaeological record from the centuries following the Middle Ages profits from structural advantages based in the economic and political history of what would eventually become the core of the Habsburg empire. In the wake of the so-called “building mania” of the Early Baroque period, especially in the decades after 1600, many mundane and religious buildings were reconstructed anew or founded, and towns really began to grow. These developments resulted in the construction of many human interventions

It might also be of interest to point out why these faunal assemblages were chosen for study. In some cases, they formed part of a “closed” or special context or were associated with an interesting ceramic assemblage. Available funding or specified research interests comprise further reasons. There may be various criteria for the grouping of the sites, with chronological and topographical position and site function being the most obvious ones. As will be discussed below, the respective structures of the animal bone assemblages may by themselves provide additional criteria for which sites were selected for inclusion here. Before and after: Roman and post-medieval animal bone studies Before a more detailed consideration of medieval animal bone studies from urban settings in Austria is offered, a short look at the periods preceding and following the Middle Ages seems useful. For some reason, the general picture of animal husbandry gained from animal bone studies, if compared to the results from medieval animal bones, appears to be more advanced both in the Antique and in the post-medieval (Early Modern) periods. To some degree, this holds true also for the early medieval period, where certain hill forts have been in the focus of research interests for decades (Kanelutti 1993; Pucher and Schmitzberger 1999). Many urban and military 10

What Makes a Medieval Urban Animal Bone Assemblage Look Urban? into the soil: in the course of activities like the backfilling of former cellars or the demolition of buildings, important amounts of archaeological materials could accumulate. The assemblages from Vienna-Alte Aula (Adam and Kunst 1999; Kühtreiber 2006) and the Carthusian monastery at Mauerbach (Galik and Kunst 2003), all dating to the first half of the seventeenth century, may serve as examples for this kind of “sedimentary” event. Because of their richness and the great regularity in their butchery marks, the appearance of luxury or high-status items (oysters, imported and very young cattle) as well as the presence of species that were part of the Lenten diet, the analysis of these assemblages permitted far-reaching social-historical conclusions. Certain elements, such as the carapace remains from the European pond turtle, are strictly linked to this period, never appearing in deposits from the medieval period proper, shedding light on the adaption of certain ideas about what constituted a correct Lenten diet: Whereas terrapin remains can be expected in any large material from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Vienna area, they have never been recorded at High and Late Medieval sites (Galik and Kunst 2004). Some other processes relevant in the Medieval/Post-Medieval transition, such as the first imports of cattle typical of the Carpathian Basin, still await sound and detailed archaeological documentation (see Knecht 1966), and the same holds true for New World imports such as the turkey (Pucher 1993). In Salzburg, a late sixteenth-century faunal assemblage, similar to that from Alte Aula, was ascribed to an affluent urban household (Pucher 1991), yielding the first evidence for Austria of New World species like the turkey. Although published data are not too numerous, the general regime for the preservation of the bone record already appears to become better for late medieval and sixteenth century contexts, both at urban areas and high status estates (Knecht 1966; Wolff 1978; Pucher 1993; Kunst 2001; Czeika and Adam 2008).

excavation rather characteristics.

than

independent

archaeological

Studies on single contexts Against expectations, these studies encompass the most important materials investigated so far; the assemblages were often diligently collected and analysed together with archaeobotanical data. They were either chosen for study because the importance of their biological content was obvious, or they may be connected with special artefacts, like associations with complete vessels. In other cases, they form parts of complex sites, but as funding for study was limited, it proved feasible only to examine some “closed” contexts. A latrine from the Augustine monastery; late medieval – sixteenth century (Vienna – Innere Stadt) During archaeological investigations carried out by the Stadtarchäologie Wien in the vicinity of the Albertina Museum in 1999, a huge deposit of dark soil, found within a rectangular structure, was collected and partially wet-sieved. The structure was later identified as a walled latrine belonging to the Augustine monastery and integrated into the city wall (Czeika and Thanheiser in Fritsch 2003). Historical evidence from 1354, containing permission for the monks to erect the cesspit directly beside the wall, is still available, and the latrine tower is visible on a picture from 1558 (Fritsch 2003). Although there was no detailed study of the pottery, the whole sedimentary complex encompasses parts of the fifteenth until the sixteenth century. The latrine tower was demolished in 1596. The flotation assemblages yielded, in addition to the “obligatory” species of the main domesticated mammals and birds, several species of wild birds (amongst them the great bustard) and fish, including the oldest remains of herring (Clupea) found and published so far in Vienna. Dietary prescriptions of the monks and sediment types may have equally contributed to this picture. Just like the plant seeds, some of the animal bones may have passed through human digestive systems, which is also demonstrated by the prevailing small-size classes of the fragments. On the other hand, as evidenced by the presence of associated remains of dogs and cats, the latrine also served as a dump for animal carcasses. The same type of short-faced, small dog was also found in a seventeenth-century cellar from the already mentioned site at Alte Aula (Adam and Kunst 1999). Although supporting historical data are particularly rich in this case, the temporal resolution of the sediments and the study of the accompanying pottery is still insufficient, making a detailed chronological analysis of this site impossible.

Case studies from Austrian medieval urban sites In the following, an overview of animal bone collections from Austrian urban sites studied in the course of the last ten years will be given. As will be shown, each assemblage offers some unique potentials and problems as well. Because of the lack of published papers, some unpublished data and personal observations from on-going excavations had to be included here. The studied materials can be grouped according to a variety of parameters such as the percentage of non-food animals or distribution of skeletal elements not connected to human consumption, the presence or absence of worked bones, whether the bones came to light from central areas or from the periphery of a town, if they were found on sites in Vienna or smaller, provincial towns. The actual context type (latrine, street layer, rubbish pit) also provides important supporting data for interpretation. In this paper, the studies will be grouped on the basis of the internal complexity of the sites, starting with “single contexts”. However, it should be kept in mind that this may rather reflect the research strategies employed during

Stallburg; fifteenth – sixteenth century (Vienna – Innere Stadt) In the winter of 2004/05, archaeological explorations were carried out by the BDA in the so-called Stallburg, a peripheral part of Vienna castle (Galik in preparation). Again, a walled latrine ranks among the more spectacular finds. This feature, situated quite close to the one 11

Günther Karl Kunst mentioned above, is also comparable to it both chronologically and contextually: constructed in the fifteenth century in the back area of a stone-walled building, it was abandoned in the years around 1500. The backfill contained a large series of nearly complete glass and ceramic vessels and was, therefore, chosen for a detailed study. The biological content, including mineralised seeds and insect remains, corroborated the feature’s interpretation as a latrine. The archaeozoological analysis (Galik in preparation), profited enormously from collaboration with archaeobotany (studied by U. Thanheiser): over 80% of about 12,500 identifiable vertebrate remains result from botanical flotation assemblages. Whereas the main domesticated mammals prevail within the hand-collected assemblages, fish and, to a lesser extent, bird remains figure prominently in the water-sieved and floated sediments. From a methodological viewpoint it might be important to note that fish remains stayed, mostly, together with the mineral residue on the sieves, while there were a higher percentage of lighter bird bones in the flotation assemblages proper. Regarding the zoological content, wild birds, mainly belonging to the passerine order, were more common than domestic fowl, and among the fish, remains of very small individuals (total length