PZG meeting: butchery
Feb. 20th, 2011 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ossamentaLast Saturday I went to Cambridge for the PZG meeting. This time the theme was butchery: how to record it, interpretations of butchery etc.
Some interesting thoughts on butchery patterns arose in two talks: on Roman and on Saxon butchery. Roman butchery seems to have been fairly consistent in urban, military and in some rural sites, the latter often road side settlements. This shows as long bones split down the middle and cleaver marks along the length of the bones. No fiddling around, just chop the meat of the bones (any bone protuberances will be chopped off as well) and then whack them open and scoop out the marrow. This is very suitable method when lots of people needs to be fed, such as towns and military sites. The rural sites don’t always match this, but could possibly be explained by retired urban or military butchers settling down elsewhere?
The Saxon sites (and unfortunately my notes didn’t make it clear whether this is valid for all sites, or only trade centres/only rural settlements) are also consistent, but in a different way: chop marks occur mostly on cattle, wheras knifes were used for disarticulation of sheep/goat and pig bones*. Skulls of all species were split lengthwise to remove the brain. The head was removed and the carcass split along the middle. This could either be done along the ”proper” midline or slightly offset. The former method would require suspending the carcass, which for the heavier cattle carcasses required sturdy beams in the slaughter house. Butchery method can thus be connected to architecture, showing that one section of archaeology cannot function in a vacuum, so to speak.
*: Sawing was only used for bone and antler working up to the later post-medieval period. Sawing took longer time, but was a precision method very suitable for craftsmen.
How to record butchery then? It depends what you want to get out of it (and, what other researchers want to get out of your data - I guess all archaeologists have at least once torn out our hair when reading interesting sentences in old reports, but which lacked the crucial information we needed). A variety of methods were used, from drawing the butchery marks on drawings of bones (later included in the site archive, but only a written summary included in the report itself), describing the butchery mark and its placement, the usage of various codes (often using the same base with individual modifications). In the end it was decided to try to come to some consensus, so it would be easier to use data from others. Hopefully something useful will come out of this. The problem is of course that each person thinks their way is preferable :-) and somewhere, something has to give.
And where to record? Databases seem obvious, but what kind of database? Windows are rather universal, but can be costly for freelancers and small units. Open source is good from a cost perspective, but which program? I’ve heard that Open Office’s database program is not as good as Access, but I assume there are others out there. I wish I had the skills to build my own, but for me, and for many others (most others?) in the community, computerese is a language we are not fluent in. I tried to teach myself Access a few years ago, but the books were either at the ”This is how you open a document”-stage or the ”need to be fluent in computerese/know at least one programming languages”-level. And they all assumed you were going to use Access for small scale business economics, and little of the information could be transferred to things I needed to know. Sigh.
Some interesting thoughts on butchery patterns arose in two talks: on Roman and on Saxon butchery. Roman butchery seems to have been fairly consistent in urban, military and in some rural sites, the latter often road side settlements. This shows as long bones split down the middle and cleaver marks along the length of the bones. No fiddling around, just chop the meat of the bones (any bone protuberances will be chopped off as well) and then whack them open and scoop out the marrow. This is very suitable method when lots of people needs to be fed, such as towns and military sites. The rural sites don’t always match this, but could possibly be explained by retired urban or military butchers settling down elsewhere?
The Saxon sites (and unfortunately my notes didn’t make it clear whether this is valid for all sites, or only trade centres/only rural settlements) are also consistent, but in a different way: chop marks occur mostly on cattle, wheras knifes were used for disarticulation of sheep/goat and pig bones*. Skulls of all species were split lengthwise to remove the brain. The head was removed and the carcass split along the middle. This could either be done along the ”proper” midline or slightly offset. The former method would require suspending the carcass, which for the heavier cattle carcasses required sturdy beams in the slaughter house. Butchery method can thus be connected to architecture, showing that one section of archaeology cannot function in a vacuum, so to speak.
*: Sawing was only used for bone and antler working up to the later post-medieval period. Sawing took longer time, but was a precision method very suitable for craftsmen.
How to record butchery then? It depends what you want to get out of it (and, what other researchers want to get out of your data - I guess all archaeologists have at least once torn out our hair when reading interesting sentences in old reports, but which lacked the crucial information we needed). A variety of methods were used, from drawing the butchery marks on drawings of bones (later included in the site archive, but only a written summary included in the report itself), describing the butchery mark and its placement, the usage of various codes (often using the same base with individual modifications). In the end it was decided to try to come to some consensus, so it would be easier to use data from others. Hopefully something useful will come out of this. The problem is of course that each person thinks their way is preferable :-) and somewhere, something has to give.
And where to record? Databases seem obvious, but what kind of database? Windows are rather universal, but can be costly for freelancers and small units. Open source is good from a cost perspective, but which program? I’ve heard that Open Office’s database program is not as good as Access, but I assume there are others out there. I wish I had the skills to build my own, but for me, and for many others (most others?) in the community, computerese is a language we are not fluent in. I tried to teach myself Access a few years ago, but the books were either at the ”This is how you open a document”-stage or the ”need to be fluent in computerese/know at least one programming languages”-level. And they all assumed you were going to use Access for small scale business economics, and little of the information could be transferred to things I needed to know. Sigh.
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 06:18 pm (UTC)I am dreaming of the day when someone will stick some kind of reasonable material-culture-management front end on a MySQL back end...but most of us have other things we are doing with our time, and most programmers are not interested. A couple of years ago someone was working on an open-source museum cataloguing and accessions system, but that seems to have fallen down along with the economy.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 07:37 pm (UTC)I understand. Doing things with half-baked knowledge may result in a workable item, but rarely something that works optimally. Coming from the other side, I know archaeologists who had got databases built for them, unfortunately by IT people who had their own opinion on what things were necessary to include and what could be excluded, ergo, lots of time and money spent on a product which didn't do the things the archaeologists needed :-/ .
Ideally, we would need more cooperation all across the board. I know it's possible - you just need to find the right people. And we need to talk to each other, using words and sentences that both sides understand.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 08:50 pm (UTC)I had very good success with the TCD Access course, but that's convenient for neither of us these days. :/
Excess and Axle
Date: 2011-03-01 02:13 am (UTC)