A Tale of Small Cows and Big Cats. Researching the Faunal Remains from the Famous Vasa, While Testing a New GIS Based System for Displaying and Analyzing Butchery Marks on Bones.

Summary

The Vasa faunal material of a little over 3000 bones offers the opportunity to analyze the spacial distribution within the ship, showing the main provision storage in the hold and spots of presumably personal food at the upper gundeck as well as some smaller bone assemblages from the provision of special groups.

All bones were, if possible, identified with taxa, skeletal element and side. The bones from the major contexts were measured after van den Driesch 1976, showing a dominant amount of small cattle, some sheep/ goat and some partly very young pigs. Game and birds are only represented by a view bones. Special is one clearly butchered ungulate femur that seems to violate the prohibition of eating horse flesh. 7 cat bones are much larger than usual for this time.

An emphasis was placed on the butchery practice. The marks where therefore mapped with GIS on the bones.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Understanding Seventeenth Century Maritime Culture: Current Research on the Swedish Warship Vasa of 1628

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 546