Preliminary Report on the Faunal Material from the Deserted Medieval Village Site in Ballintober, Co. Roscommon, Ireland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper presents a preliminary faunal analysis from the deserted medieval village site in Ballintober, Co. Roscommon, in Ireland. Studies on faunal materials from medieval villages during the Anglo-Norman conquest and colonialism of Ireland are currently few, but they are crucial to better understand human-animal interaction in this period of social and political change. This study will illuminate aspects of the daily lives of ordinary people, an area understudied in high medieval Ireland compared to monastic and other castle and elite sites. The preliminary data from the excavated house plot in the village at Ballintober show signs of food processing and a range of domestic species, and the results of the analysis will reveal the animal abundance and diversity within this domestic context. These data will help answer questions about subsistence economies and life histories of the animals in the village. I will also discuss the evidence of modification and processing to draw interpretations about butchery practices and diet, and I will further compare the archaeological data to the historical data. While these results presently concern the earlier layers of occupation, this preliminary report provides new insight into human-animal interaction in medieval villages during the Anglo-Norman occupation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38495.0