Marta, Livius et al.: The Late Bronze Age Settlement of Nyíregyháza-Oros „Úr Csere” (Satu Mare, 2010)

X.Elisabeta Berendi: Archaeozoological Description of the Faunal Remnants

as being smaller than the average). Also, this size fits to the horses described by El Susi23 in a tumulus at Ripiceni, who mentions in her work that the average horse withers height calculated for Romanian Bronze Age by Haimovici is 138.4 cm. Our site being close geographically to this one, we can consider this as good comparative data. Average calculated for Hungarian Bronze Age horses is over 136 cm, so our horses are typical Bronze Age horses on this territory.

Canis familiáris (dog)

The 107 bones found on the site came from a minimal number of only 15 individuals of! Many pits contained partial dog skeletons. According to these bones, most of the animals died in an adult age, only 5 fragments can be defined as subadults, and only 4 as juveniles. This shows that people took good care of their dogs, most of them living a nice number of years. One of the bones was wearing slight gnawing marks (probably from another dog), and one bone looked boiled and was cut. This is analyzed at the description of the Cx4 pit. Also, there was a complete skull found in the pit no. Cxi 53, along with the horse skull mentioned above. Bones of a juvenile dog were found in ritual pit no. Cx245.

There were only two elements that provided metrical data24 for withers height calculations:

Element

GL

Bp

Dp

sb

sd

Bd

Dd

wh

femur

sin.

186.6

37.4

20

14.3

13.7

33.1

35.7

561.66

femur

dext.

154.2

33

15.3

11.6

11.3

26.9

27.3

464.14

Tab. 5: Metrical data of dog bones

Dogs of these sizes are usually called “sheepdogs”, though these two individuals represent two types of very different sizes. Bronze Age dogs are difficult to categorize, because they are not that clearly bred as starting from the Roman Age. Also, they do not

23 According to El Susi (2000)

24 Abbreviations after Angela von der Driesch (1976)

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