Caprines in the Cattle Zone: Reconciling Faunal Data at Two Scales during the Early Neolithic in the Sofia Basin, Bulgaria

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Animal husbandry was a major adaptive mechanism facilitating the spread of farming communities throughout southeastern Europe. Recent big-data syntheses have contributed greatly to our understanding of the environmental and social processes of neolithization in the region. While faunal reports often form an integral component of these studies, issues of data standardization and analytical choices understandably prevent achieving the resolution needed to investigate human behavior and decision making at the site level. This can lead to a mischaracterization of human-animal relationships at the smaller scale on which they are enacted. The early Neolithic (ca. 6100–5800 BCE) site of Slatina in Bulgaria’s Sofia Basin provides a useful example. From a regional perspective, Slatina appears to be in the more temperate zone of increased reliance on cattle husbandry. The zooarchaeological and isotopic data presented here offer a zoomed-in look at herding, landscape use, and consumptive practices based on a mixed management strategy primarily focused on caprines. This study highlights the potential of faunal data to weigh in on prehistoric phenomena at multiple scales while stressing the central role zooarchaeology should play at the interpretive level by providing useful proxies on human behavior at the smaller scale of a site and its environs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Animal Bones to Human Behavior   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32576