Póczy Klára: Forschungen in Aquincum 1969- 2002 (Aquincum Nostrum 2. Budapest, 2003)

6. Die Wirtschaft Aquincums im Spiegel der neuen Funde - 6.3. Animals and Roman lifeways in Aquincum (Alice M. Choyke)

advantage of working in the Roman period is that there is a wealth of epigraphic and pictorial (Fig. 1) information available about animal husbandry practices in the empire.

7 Taphonomy of complex sites While there are numerous advantages to studying the bones from well documented complex societies, there are also disadvantages. Material coming from archaeological sites can be modified by contemporary cultural behavior such as preferential selection of which animals should be slaughtered, butchering traditions, cooking customs, garbage disposal and clearing work.

8 Sites in Aquincum range from dwellings of native farmers to upper class Romans and legionary officers to public housing, to villa-farms to ditches near workshops to military forts and their surrounding villages. The different customs of people and the various ways the sites functioned all ultimately affect which bones from which species are present and how different butchering traditions affect the form of bones. Since the soils around Aquincum are conducive to preservation being largely alkaline, another main source of bias is related to the continual remodeling which took place at these settlements and the shifting of refuse out of its temporal contexts. Further, the exigencies of rescue archaeology and a lack of training have meant that until recently few archaeologists had the time and energy to learn how to integrate finer excavation techniques, especially screening, into their excavation schedules. This is changing now at many of our excavations. 7 Varro T., Rerum rusticarum libri très. Budapest, 1971. Also, there are numerous stone reliefs depicting animals pulling wagons as well as simple depictions of animals. At Aquincum there are honey cake molds (crustullum) showing Bacchus with a donkey, Hermes with a ram and various triumphal marches with elegant horses. 8 Sciffer, M., Toward the Identification of Formation Processes. In: Behavioral Archaeology. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 1995, 177-182. Schiffer discusses the general processes, both natural and cultural which may affect all artifacts. Fig. 1. Lithograph from Trajen's column in Rome's Forum showing a cattle, sheep and pig being taken away as war bouty. These three domesticates were the basis of animal keeping in Pannónia province. Roman animal keeping in Pannónia In general, it can be said that provincial Romans depended largely on domestic animals for a variety of purposes in contrast to the preceding Celtic period during which meat from wild animals such as red deer and wild boar, was much more important in the diet. In Pannónia, cattle is overwhelmingly dominant in faunal assemblages, especially from military establishments. Cattle will always be slightly overrepresented because their larger bones are relatively weaker than compact bones from smaller animals and tend to fragment into more pieces.

9 Caprines and pig proportions vary depending on the kind of settlement involved, with more Romanized towns having fewer sheep remains.

10 9 Binford, L. - Bertram, J. B., Bone frequencies and attritional processes. In (L. R. Binford ed.) For Theory Building in Archaeology. New York, 1977, 77-152. Bartosiewicz, L., Faunal material from two Hallstatt Period settlements in Slovenia. Arheoloski Vestnik 42 (1991) 199-205; Bartosiewicz, L., Interim report on the Bronze Age animal bones from Arslatepe (Malatya, Anatolia). In: (Buitenhuis, H. - Bartosiewicz L. - A. M. Choyke eds.) Archaeozoology of the Near East III. ARC Publication 18, Groningen, 1998, 221-232. 10 King, A., A Comparative Survey of Bone Assemblages from Roman Sites in Britain. Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeol-