Isotopes and Texts: Animal Management Strategies in Ancient Greece

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Integrating textual sources, a largely qualitative dataset, with archaeological science, a largely quantitative dataset, is no easy task for archaeologists and historians. This paper reflects on the challenges and opportunities of integrating the textual and biochemical evidence for animal management in the ancient Greek world. Over the last several decades, archaeologists and historians have argued over the topic of animal husbandry in the ancient Greek world. Some scholars have marshaled ethnographic and historical evidence for mobile herds moving seasonally between uplands and lowlands to argue that ancient Greek animals were managed similarly. Other scholars have argued, also on the basis of ethnographic and historical evidence, that animals were reared in smaller herds and largely tied to agricultural land that produced fodder and grazing. Here, we present isotope evidence from ancient Crete relevant to the question at hand: a multi-isotope sequential series that examines seasonal diet and mobility in sheep and goats. Instead of either model, there is a large amount of variability in the ways in which animals were reared. Here, we examine quantitative and qualitative approaches to comparing the isotope evidence with textual sources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40010.0