Bones As Evidence of Meat Production and Distribution in York

This is a repository copy of Bones as evidence of meat production and distribution in York. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/1168/ Book Section: O'Connor, T.P. (2000) Bones as evidence of meat production and distribution in York. In: White, E., (ed.) Feeding a city: York. The provision of food from Roman times to the beginning of the twentieth century. Prospect Books , Devon, UK , pp. 43-60. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ CHAPTER TWO BONESAS EVIDENCEOF MFATPRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTIONIN YORK Boms - THEIR STRENGTHSAND WEAKNESSES any books and papers have been wrirren on the general principles and minutiae of using the animal bones recovered from Marchaeological deposits as a source of information on past diet.'",-3 A 1511discussion of merhodoIogical issues is beyond the remit of this chapter, but. it is worth reminding ourselves that there are many stages berween an animal being killed and used for food, and a pile of bones arriving on rhe bench. There is the initial stage of decision-making on the parr of the human population, and of individuals within it., and possibly on the part of the animals as well. Those decisions bring people and animaIs together ar rhe point of the animals' death, and may we11 be what we are seeking to infer from the archaeological record. After slaughter, animals of any size wilI be butchered in various ways, and parts of one carcass may be traded or redisr- ributed to several locations, at. each of which different people wilI take further decisions as to recipe and utilizarion. Some bones will have been separared from the carcass during initial butchering, and will be disposed of fairly immediately. After consumption (and different individuals wilI have different ideas as to what is worth eating), the remaining bones and other waste might be used in some orher way (soup, glue, toothpicks), before being destroyed or deposited in some dump or refuse pit. Micro-organisms and geochemicaI agents then ser ro work, modifying and destroying some or all bone fragments through the centuries, until a residue reaches a tenuous equilibrium wit11 the sediment around it, and survives until rhe archaeologisrs arrive on site.4 Each of these stages filters rhe data that we may obtain from the bones, distorts those dara somewhar, and reduces them considerably. We archaeologists then add more distortions as we decide how to excavate the site, retrieve the bones, identify and record them. At least we can examine and control these distortions to some extent. To look on the bright side, we have the physical remains of dead animals, o fien bearing clear evidence of their use as food. The fact rhat the bones have been found in association with human occupation is strong circumstantial evidence that the animals were utilized in some way, although the remains of rats and mice serve to remind us rhat: animals utilize us as well. Often, the evidence that animals served as food is quite direct, raking the form of bones that have obviously been chopped during rhe process of butchering, or more subtle cut-marks showing where a knife has been used neatly to remove meat from bone. Our data, then, have been heavily filtered through the processes of butchering, cooking, and burial, yet they retain compelling evidence of quire small details of'those processes. The filters which act on archaeological data are different CO those which disrort the historical record - accounts of banquets tend not ro reflect the general diet - so we should nor expect the archaeological and historical sources to tell the same stoq nor should we get too flustered when they do nor. Rather, clle rwo different sources should be seen as complementary, requiring quite diiexent expertise, but bearing upon common issues. BONESFROM YORK - THEIR ST~NGTHSAND WEA[U\TESSES. The city of York has been the site of numerous excavations over a quarter of a cenruxy.5 The grear majoriry of that excavation work has been undertaken by the same organization, the Yorlc Archaeological Trust, and that gives to the archaeological record for rhe city a particular consistency. At many though by no means all, of the excavated sites in York, there has been good preservation of large quantities of animal bones, ohm closely dated and in close association with particular structures. A very large dataset has been acc~unulated,covering the period from the city's origins at the end of the first cehtury AD, through to early modern deposits of the eighteenth and nineteenth cenrwies, though this most recent period, curiously enough, is the least well represented. The large potential dataset is one ofYork's greatest strengths. It is nor so much that we needto record tens ofd~oc~andsof bones, but with such a large dacaser it becomes possible to rejecr more of the poor quality data, and to concentrate BONESAS EVIDENCEOF MEATPRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION on well-recovered samples fiom chose deposits that show the best integrity in terms of dating and human activities. It also becomes possible to look at different parts of the city over the same period of time, to gain an impression of spatial variation, as well as of changes through time. Ironically, the sheer social complmiry ofYork through much of irs history presents both opportunities for research and major problems. The Roman fortress acquired a civilian settlement and became the chief city of northern Britannia. Through the fifth to seventh centuries, much of the city seems to have been more or less abandoned, until settlement of a greenfield site just outside the city around AD 700. By the later ninth century, the main focus of the city's economic activiry seems to have shified back into the old ciy centre, and from that point onwards the medieval city expanded in exrent and dwel- oped in nature. Tl~roughour,there were large-scale processes of trade and disrribution going on, with smaller-scale household decisions complicating the interpretation of the animat bones. None the less, there are important quesrions that we can ask, both in terms of city-wide issues of supply and demand, and in terms of the smaller derails that illuminate past lives. This chaprer will arrempr to answer a series of quesrions. W~atwas earen, or what were the main red meats, ~oultryand fish ~rovisioningYork through nearly two thousand years? Where did it come from, or whar was 'firm produce', what came from peoples' backyards, what was hunted and fished? %at changes can we see rhrough time, and what might those changes indicate? To cut a long story short, beef seems to have been the predominant red mear consumed in York rhroughout the ciry's history. Cattle bones predominate in most Roman and rnedievd bone assemblages from Yorlc, somerimes to a remarkable degree (Table 2). Converting amounts of bone to meat conrrib- ution is notoriousIy but rnalring keasonable estimates of the carcass ~veighrof medieval and earlier cartle, sheep, and pigs, and a few assumptions about utilizarion (i.e. how much of the potential meat plus offal was actually used), it looks as if beef comprised 7-80 per cent by weight of the red meat consumed in York from the second century to the seventeenth. The remaining 20-30 per cent is mutton and pork, varying with time horn roughly equal proportions to about two-thirds ~ork.The main change through time here is a gradual increase in the amount of sheep bone entering York's refuse through the late medieval period and into Tudor times. This trend is very obvious in terms of bones, though when converted to estimates of red meat, it does not amount to a big difference. Of the other red mean, horse bones are scarce on most sites in York, with only the occasional specimen bearing knife-cuts to indicate some utilization of rhe meat. Given the well-known Papal condemnation of hippophagy at the time of St Boniface, rhis is hardly surprising. The few apparenrly butchered examples may represent rhe use of horse-meat as food for dogs, or unscrupulous butchers passing off horse-meat as venison. Venison itself seems to have featured hardly at all in the diet, with occasional finds of roe deer bones in Roman deposits, and some fallow deer remains at medieval sites such as rhe Bcdern.7 Red deer is apparenrly well-represented in ninth to rwelfil~centuly deposits, but the great majority of identificarions of rhis species aebased on antler and represent the use of this precious raw material rather than the consumption of ~enison.~ Rabbit is absent until the medieval period, and only common in York from the mid-1300s onwards, particularly in sixteenth- to seventeenth- century features. One gains the impression rhar rabbits may have been out there in rhe countryside, but they only came into the urban food supplies once enough of them had escaped from managed coney warrens ro establish large free-living popuIations that were worth hunring, and, perhaps, generally accessible.

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