Gaál Attila (szerk.): A Wosinszky Mór Múzeum Évkönyve 20. (Szekszárd, 1998)
László Bartosiewitz: Váralja-Várfő középkori állatcsontleletei
production centers. 7 In addition, most of the cattle remains originate from high and medium (Table 3: Categories A and B) quality carcass cuts. The contribution of bones representing poor quality meat is less than 15%, skull fragments are rare and horn cores are completely missing. Maltby 8 has sought to relate broad economic theories to the bone assemblages deposited in intensively occupied settlements by equating bone debris from large scale carcass processing, as with significant accumulations of primary butchery waste. The limited area under investigation here, however, did not contain clearly recognizable deposits such as the skull fragments and metapodia identified in great numbers at a rural butchering site near Örménykút in Hungary. 9 Butchering marks also suggest that the castle's inhabitants may have been provisioned with dressed carcasses lacking head and feet. This may be the reason that in these elements are underrepresented in the assemblage. István Vörös 10 has pointed out that, as opposed to practices in Antiquity, medieval cattle carcasses were usually not deboned after slaughtering but sold and transported in the form of major cuts with the bones. Cutmarks were made most probably using knives at all levels of carcass processing. Marks of primary hacking with bards or cleavers, an important technique used during primary butchering, were observed only on a humerus and a thoracic vertebra. Most smaller cutmarks are indicative of secondary butchering that must have taken place on a household level. Partly as a consequence of pot-sizing, no complete cattle long bones that could have been used in withers height estimations were preserved. Sheep {Ovis aries L. 1758) and goat (Capra hircus L. 1758) The importance of sheep during the early Middle Ages is clearly illustrated by its high contribution to the faunal list from this 13 th century castle. As is shown in Figure 1, the contribution of mature and adult animals to the sub-assemblage of these species was also around 70%. This may be indicative of exploitation for wool or (especially in the case of goat) milk, which both require the keeping of older animals. On the basis of an intact radius, the whithers height of a small but mature individual was estimated to be 45.6 cm. 11 The proportion of bones representing the lowest category (C) of meat quality is less than 10%. It may thus be speculated whether most mutton was taken to the castle from the outside. Neither were the animals skinned here. Horn-cores of sheep or goat are also absent from this bone assemblage. In addition to osteological evidence, written sources such as the inventories of the nearby Pécsvárad monastery 12 as well as donation documents and tax rolls of the Dömös church district near the Danube Bend Gorge in Northern Hungary 13 mention thousands of sheep, which illustrates the importance of sheep keeping during the 11th-13th centuries. Historical records also show that during the short 13th century Mongol Tartar occupation of eastern Hungary, dues were primarily collected in sheep 14 . This example shows the occupiers' preference for these animals as well as the sufficiently great supply of sheep. In the Buda toll tariffs issued in 1255, shortly after the Tartar invasion, sheepskins as well as black and pied lambskins were mentioned 15 . Pig (Sus domesticus Erxl. 1777) In the material from the Váralja Castle, the proportion of cattle and pig remains was exactly equal (Table 1). In spite of a diachronically increasing tendency, the contribution of pig barely attains 10-15% of the NISP calculated for cattle in those urban deposits. 16 The typically high proportion of bones from subadult pigs and even piglets is clearly shown in Figure 1. This age distribution is widely regarded as proof of single-purpose meat exploitation. In the case of pig, the contribution of „C" category bones is relatively high, especially due to the presence of numerous cranial elements (cf. with cattle in Table 1). In contrast to cattle, both the head and feet (especially of young) pig are not only edible but considered delicacies. 7 CRABTREE 1988. 8 MALTBY 1984. 9 BARTOSffiWITZ1988. 10 VÖRÖS 1992,232. "TEICHERT1975,54. 12 GAAL1966,79 13 KNAUZ 1874, 92; RODICZKY 1880, 5. I4 TURCHÁNYI1904,50. "KOVÁCSY 1923,97. 16 BARTOSIEWITZ 1995b. 158
