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Sheep vs Goats - Ep04
561 Plays7 years ago
Simon brings on a guest Albina Hulda Palsdottir to talk about sheep vs goats - what's similar and what's different.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Setup
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Archaeo Animals. Today we'll be talking about sheep and goats.
00:00:28
Speaker
All right, so welcome again to Arceo Animals. This is episode, what episode is it? Episode four. And I don't know. It's been a very long day.
Sheep and Goats in Archaeology
00:00:41
Speaker
And today we'll be talking about sheeps and sheeps. Oh my gosh. Sheep. Sheep?
00:00:48
Speaker
Is that the plural? Oh, they don't mind, I'm sure. I just generally just realise, like, oh, it's sheep, isn't it? Sheep and goats. There we go. Sheep and goats. Pretty... Would you say they're pretty, um, you know, common on sites? Omnipresent. Yeah. That was gonna be a pun, but I'm too drawn today for puns.
00:01:16
Speaker
Oh my God, I just realized we never really introduced ourselves. I'm your host, Alex Fitzpatrick, and with me as always. You don't want to know. It's Simona again. And actually, in this episode, we were going to have Kearney the rabbit as a silent spectator. But Sandy insisted that she'd come back on the show because, you know, talking about sheep and goat, that's all the reason she's alive in the first place, being a herding dog. And, you know, she's been poorly lately and all that. So we'll allow it.
00:01:45
Speaker
So just as a little, I forgot how to English as well today. As a disclaimer, if you hear random noises and scratching, I'm not being weird. It's just, it's Sandy chipping in. Well, yeah, you know, I mean, we're an animal podcast, we have to have animals on the podcast as well, even if they're just really quiet. Because I think we do get human guests every now and then, but the staple is just the animal guest.
00:02:11
Speaker
It's gonna be one every time. Which, speaking of, we do actually have a guest this episode. Yeah. Yeah. But, well, more on that later.
Challenges in Zooarchaeology
00:02:20
Speaker
So, let's just start talking about sheep and goats, not sheeps and goats, because I know how to English now. And I'm infecting you with my non-native speaker-ness. No, I just don't think I ever learned, really.
00:02:34
Speaker
Anyway, so it kind of ties into domestication, which is what we've kind of been talking about on and off in these last couple episodes. When you're dealing with domestic sites, farm sites, things like that, you're more likely going to find sheep, so they're pretty prevalent on sites specifically here in Britain. And, you know, it makes sense. Sheep and goats. Why does that sound so weird to say?
00:03:00
Speaker
you know, they produce a lot, which is why people in the past would have them on their sites. Yeah, and I guess they're fairly easy-ish to look after. They sort of like to do their own thing. But the reason why, yeah, the reason we've sort of like grouped them together is because then sheep and goats are sort of a very prevalent sort of research topic in zoarchaeology, sort of worldwide, just because of how much of a pain it is to tell the two apart.
00:03:31
Speaker
Because even though they're two distinct species, they are part of the same genus, Ovis. So morphologically, they're similar enough to drive you ever so slightly insane when you've got them in your assemblage.
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I want to say I don't think I've ever run into goat in my assemblage, but that could be that I'm just not noticing it. Because like you said, they do look almost exactly the same to the point that it really has been a kind of contentious topic among zoo archaeologists. There's definitely a lot of work being done sort of especially in recent years.
00:04:09
Speaker
but I guess it's one of those things that is probably the case that British economy or like just economy in the in the British Isles has been mostly centered around sheep but of course there's also the question of how much of you know goats have just gone like misidentified and just put down a sheep because that's what we expect so like we
00:04:33
Speaker
you know, like inadvertently buy us our sample, we are sheep. I've done it plenty of times myself. Like I don't, I find it like a bit of a metapodial or something. And my mind will just go straight to sheep and no, I'm gone. Let's find out whether a sheep or goat. Well, yeah, again, though, like, it's just we all kind of assume that we're going to find sheep at some point.
00:04:52
Speaker
again, especially here in Britain. So it's easy to just kind of be like, oh, that's going to be another sheep. And it could be a goat, honestly. I think the closest I ever got to almost having a goat was a horn core that I found in an assemblage. But I ended up just riding sheep because it just seemed more in shape with a sheep.
Economic Roles of Sheep and Goats
00:05:14
Speaker
it's just a good or like sheep slash goat or ovicapra um yeah ovicapra is the uh the proper term i believe but i'm not because one of those things that um sheep and goats are telling them apart the
00:05:29
Speaker
differences that are sort of very easily discerned without resorting to biometry or anything. What I'm trying to say is that there's very few elements sort of in sheep and goat that are easily distinguishable that you literally you find it during excavation say, Oh, no, that's definitely goat. You might be able to it just probably you're more knowledgeable than I am. I would never ever say that.
00:05:55
Speaker
But just kind of like talking about, like sheep and goats have kind of similar purposes as living creatures though. I mean, they're known for their secondary products, which is why they're usually kept domesticated. You've got wool, you've got milk, all that kind of stuff, and then of course you have meat occasionally.
00:06:19
Speaker
Yeah, and apparently like in certain regions, goats were actually used for traction. Oh, really? I don't know that. Yeah, okay. We'll get back to that because I can't quite recall. Oh, no. No. Of course. It was mostly in settlements in Italy during the Roman period. The no, no, no was mostly to myself because like,
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah, I swear I'm turning into a Roman archaeologist. I thought something bad had happened, but it is. It is, yes, now it is. Unpopular opinion here, but I don't like the Romans.
00:07:03
Speaker
is just it ever so happens. It ever so happens that most of the remains that you tend to find on sites in Britain, I mean, the Romans are omnipresent. So I left Italy when I was 19, moved to Britain, did archaeology here, who follows me? The Romans. So like, no matter where I go, no matter where I look, the Romans will just like hold me to the jaws of hell.
00:07:27
Speaker
Okay, we'll just rename the episode as the one where Simona loses it and we'll move on. To be fair, I feel like this podcast is turning into an anti-classical archaeology podcast, which we're not.
00:07:44
Speaker
But personally, I always found class archaeology boring, but you know, that's not the topic of this episode, but maybe it will be a topic of a bonus episode one day. So we'll get a guest that is a classical zoarchaeologist and they'll be able to tell you all about it if you're interested because
00:08:02
Speaker
Yeah, because we're not. But yeah,
Historical Significance of Sheep Breeds
00:08:06
Speaker
okay, so going back to sheep and goats. So they do have very similar, are used for very similar reasons on sites. So in a lot of ways, I mean, I don't want to say that it doesn't matter that we distinguish the two, but in like the grand scheme of things, I guess.
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah, I guess the one thing why would be important is that to an extent, whether a settlement will have sheep or goats tell you something about the environment, because species, even though they're very similar, they're adapted to slightly different environments. And I guess like this, with goats being more suitable to rougher terrain, well,
00:08:50
Speaker
sheep kind of like to happily graze on hills. No, yeah, that's fair. Yeah, what an idyllic landscape I just painted. I'm a poet.
00:09:05
Speaker
You're a poet and I'm apparently a proponent of the laziest zoo archeology ever. But no, you're right. I mean, it's the reason why we always should push for more detailed zoo archeology analysis in general. But yeah, no, definitely. So kind of moving on a bit, what else would you say sheep and goat remains tell us about sites besides the fact that it was probably domestic site?
00:09:34
Speaker
Well I guess again as you mentioned earlier we're looking at sort of with sheep and goat again we can gain inference on the type of economy that was practiced in the particular settlement even though again the products that you would have gotten from sheep and goat are sort of similar but not quite because of course sheep being used a lot more for wool and wool being indeed one of the most important products at the time
00:10:00
Speaker
because he would have been used for clothes and blankets and taking people an awful amount of time to do it. Because I've actually done it just for this, what I've done for this episode is I've actually invested in a spindle well.
00:10:17
Speaker
And I've got some fleece from the sheep, the monks, Laotan, if that's how you pronounce it, that they keep a butzer ancient farm, which I've since visited from when we mentioned it in our first episode. So I got one of the little kits that they had there. And I thought like, Oh, we'll try spinning wool.
00:10:34
Speaker
It takes a long time. I don't know how people in antiquity got anything done. You'll be like, oh darling, did you manage to go hunt? I've only made 10 centimetres worth. What's a centimetre? I don't know.
00:10:55
Speaker
OK. Just to go back for a bit, though. Milke, I'm just saying. It might be good to also, just real quick, ID what a spindle whirl is for the audience, because not everyone will probably know. I've taken some photographs of me attempting and failing at spinning wool. And it's an instrument, it would have been made out of a variety of materials, but it's
00:11:22
Speaker
Well, it's a stick with a rolly finger at the end. But it's essentially, it's got a hook on top which you attach the fleece onto. And then essentially by spinning it round, it will spin the wool into actual yarn. Sounds pretty boring. It takes some time. But yeah, wool. Just shows you tenacity of the past
Domestication History
00:11:47
Speaker
peoples, I guess.
00:11:50
Speaker
You gotta get dressed for winter. Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's motivation enough to do it, is, well, you could either spin wool, take ages, or freeze enough.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's either that or making sort of boundaries like with wooden fences and things because imagine like doing that with just like rods and with ease and just like weaving or even like basketry. And it's great. I wish to learn all of that one day because it's good. I think it's very good that we keep these traditions alive and these crafts, but also it takes some time like hats off to everyone that does it and is keeping the tradition alive because it's just
00:12:34
Speaker
we're just not made for it it is pretty cool though and also uh
00:12:39
Speaker
Talk a bit more about going to Butter Farm, because you saw the goats there, didn't you? Sorry. I just think of, yeah, I love the goats over there. I'm so jealous. I saw the pictures, they look great. I'm just, yeah, I'm struggling to articulate a little bit, but I really loved both the sheep and the goats, and Sandy loved the sheep and the goats to the point in which we had to take her away.
00:13:07
Speaker
because she never met a sheep or a goat before. And of course, she's a herding breed. They are the reason she's alive. So things saying that she really liked them would be an understatement. Now I really enjoyed meeting the sheep and goats also because like other sort of ancient farms like
00:13:28
Speaker
fengate, which you also discussed in the first episode, they like to keep sort of ancient breeds. And of course, what is meant by ancient breed is that it's not exactly, you know, the same sheep they would have had in the Neolithic, but probably like closest. Close enough. Yeah, I think. Close enough. And so they had traditional breeds, they had Manx Laoten for sheep, and their traditional English goats.
00:13:52
Speaker
which I particularly liked because they're marking on the coats. It reminded me a lot of antelopes and I befriended one of the goats to the point in which I decided to paint a portrait of her until four in the morning. I just gave her lots of chin scratches, which I'm sure is of no relevance to anyone who's listening to the podcast. But I did really enjoy that goat and she seemed to enjoy my company.
00:14:16
Speaker
So. Well, to be fair, though, it's a great example of if anyone's really interested in, you know, learning more about past sheep and goat species, Butzer Farm is a great place to visit. I swear they're not paying us. I wish they were. Are you kidding me? I also wish they'd pay for me to go visit because I'm broke.
00:14:39
Speaker
I'll take you down at some point. Oh, thanks. But yeah, no, it's similar to what they, there's a bunch of sheep in the Orkneys as well, who are kind of like an old breed of sheep that specifically is known for eating seaweed. Oh, you get sheep eating seaweed down in Romneymarsh as well, so in the southwest.
00:15:07
Speaker
Okay. But there's a few sort of primitive slash rare breeds about, at least in Britain. So you've got, yeah, the Manx, was probably not loud enough to be Manx, Luden. I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce it. Please, because the breed is native to the Isle of Man. So please, if there's anyone listening from the Isle of Man, tell me how to pronounce it.
00:15:33
Speaker
And they're supposed to, you know, much like some of the Orkney sheep are meant to descend from the primitive sheep once they're found sort of in Shetland, Scotland, the Hebrides. And you have, yeah, you got your own Shetland breed and Hebridean breed out. You pronounce it, not a native speaker, please don't shoot the non-native speaker. And of course you have the Sowy, which they keep at Fengate.
00:16:00
Speaker
which again, a primitive sheep and the way you can tell is that they're kind of small and stocky-ish. Yeah, they have sort of coarse hair, but essentially with ancient sheep breeds, they won't be exactly the same as, but again, close enough because they're the closest to what they would have looked like sort of back in the day. So some of them do indeed sort of very loosely descend supposedly from the sheep that were first
00:16:28
Speaker
brought into Britain during the Neolithic because that might come as a shocker to a lot of people that sheep are not native to Britain, like not even by chance, just no. Yeah and I think with that we are going to take a short break but when we come back we will be talking more about sheep and goats and how we can tell if they're in our assemblages. Let's scratch our chin some more.
00:16:55
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:18:03
Speaker
All right, and we're back with episode four of Archaeo Animals. We're talking about sheep and goats. And so just to start off this next segment, let's kind of talk more about, you know, where they're
Genetic Studies on Livestock
00:18:17
Speaker
actually from. Because again, they're really important to how we understand domestication, so of course we'd want to understand where they're actually from. So, Simone, if you want to take that.
00:18:26
Speaker
Well I guess in terms of the domestication of sheep and goats itself it'll be a lot of the same stuff that's been mentioned for other domesticates and dogs in the previous episode that of course even though we can speculate on when and where they were domesticated based on the first evidence that we found it is more than likely that both species were actually domesticated in
00:18:47
Speaker
different areas, you know, different attempts were made during different time periods. The dog is chewing on my headphones. That's fine. She's just very keen on the topic. But of course, from the evidence we have, we presume that sheep descend from the mouflon, whose scientific name is Ovis Orientalis.
00:19:09
Speaker
and they're supposedly domesticated so around 11,000 to 9,000 BC. So among the earliest right after dogs and that's supposed to take place sort of in the Near East because let's face it all domestications have essentially taken place in the Near East. After the word domesticated sort of in that region sheep husbandry just like spread like wildfire
00:19:30
Speaker
across like Eastern Europe and Western Europe. And as we mentioned before, of course, sheep are a very sort of reliable staple domesticate because they're, they're just good happily, you know, grazing away on low grassland. Because that's one of the differences I forgot is that sheep graze goats browse. Was that really? I had no idea about that. That also sounds ridiculously fake.
00:19:58
Speaker
I'll put something about that in the show notes, if I can find it. Goats were domesticated supposedly sort of around the same a similar time period in southwest Asia, you know, maybe southeast Europe as well. And of course, compared to sheep, they're hardier, more versatile, require less care than sheep would
00:20:23
Speaker
And, you know, they're happy enough just in poor soil conditions. So they're nice all round animal. They're still sort of more, I guess, more widespread in the southern part of Europe compared to northern Europe. Yeah, because you tend to find them a lot more in the Mediterranean, even like where I'm from to this day, because they're just so reliable and then easygoing. But that might just be me because I really like goats and I'm just very biased.
00:20:49
Speaker
But yes, that's more likely where sheep and goat come from. And of course, she had the investigation taking an awful amount of time and happening in several locations. And again, as for dogs and other sort of main domesticates, it probably involved the corolling of young animals.
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, that just resulted in us having lovely, lovely, fluffy friends that are still friends with us to this day. And they make up about 90% of zoo archaeology assemblages. And probably life on earth, minus cockroaches. God, gross. I can't believe you would ruin this episode about adorable sheep with that. I don't know, I've already lost it when I made yet another reference to Roman archaeology.
00:21:40
Speaker
And there's more to come because of course, much like dogs in the Roman period, they would already have breeds of both sheep and goats.
00:21:52
Speaker
which of course wouldn't be the same breeds that we have now. I think we went down a rabbit hole in the previous episode about how you can't really discern breeds in the archaeological record, but breeds were indeed a thing. I've had a little scout around the written record and again, we're talking Roman stuff. Forgive us for talking about Roman stuff.
00:22:15
Speaker
Yeah. And again, what the ones I found so frequently being mentioned are like Ethiopians, Arabians and white fleece sheep, goat-haired Ethiopians. Luckily, that's a thing. And tarantines.
00:22:36
Speaker
which I presume will probably correct me if I'm wrong because literally off the top of my head because that reminds me of a town in Italy called Taranto. Okay. I believe it's in Apulia, so that might be where the breed came from. But please, if you're into sheep, tell me more about that. We mean if you're into sheep.
00:23:04
Speaker
But yeah, no, it's funny because I feel like when we talk about breeds, I think everyone immediately goes to dog. So it's always interesting to kind of talk more about breeds and different animals, like, as you say, sheep and goat. Oh, because they would have had all sorts of like coming in a variety of colours, whether those were intended or not. And
00:23:25
Speaker
I guess the same with goats, but I think compared to sheep, goat breeds, other than the primitive goat, or at least for Britain anyway, more breeds didn't get established until much later on.
00:23:41
Speaker
which in a way sort of caused some trouble to the British primitive goat, which is, as the name suggests, sort of the closest thing we have to the goats of sort of brought over during the Neolithic, they would have had very coarse hair and big horns. But then from the 18th century, they started like developing hornless breeds for very obvious reasons, because I like sheep, you know, like goats are not always as mellow.
00:24:07
Speaker
They will ram into you if they sow the side. They won't hurt much, but it's still, you know, not pleasant. So as they develop sort of hornless breeds, the primitive goat really suffers. So I think it's now classed as a rare breed because there's very few about, like just a few feral herds and captive individuals.
00:24:29
Speaker
But enough about Breeds and more about the bones, I guess. Yeah, I was going to say, actually, speaking of, you know, having hornless ones, I mean, that's one of the ways we can kind of pinpoint whether or not we've got sheep in our assemblages, at least for me. Although, of course, you can kind of confuse them with cattle horns.
Identification Methods in Zooarchaeology
00:24:54
Speaker
Yeah I guess you could yeah and I think what the reason because there are also hornless breeds what makes it really tricky is when it comes to sexing because of course we have sexual dimorphism is usually a what it is a fairly good indicator of sex and now the
00:25:13
Speaker
misconceptions that of course like any applies to cows as well is that the males will have horns and the females won't but then you get certain breeds where the females also have horns and you get breeds where the males don't have horns. Because you know it can't nothing can be simple. Because life is difficult. Yeah.
00:25:37
Speaker
In fact, I was looking, in terms of discerning between sheep and goat bones, I do actually have a couple of bones scattered around here, including two skulls, but the one sheep that I've got is horn-less. So, it's not being- I've got plenty of horned sheep. I can always take a picture for the show notes if you want.
00:25:56
Speaker
I think I've got a few horned ones, but they're in bubble wrap at the minute. So I've not properly unpacked the reference material. Although you can at a glance, I guess the skull is one of the easier ones, more so than teeth themselves, even though there are ways to distinguish between sheep and goat by looking at the teeth. I actually find the best indicator in the skull is the nose, like the nasal. Because sheep tend to have sort of a Roman nose or a mean nose.
00:26:25
Speaker
Because of course, you will know what I look like. I've got about my nose is as large as it is delicate. Not unlike that of a sheep. While goat noses tend to be more delicate, if that makes any sense at all. No, I mean, that makes sense to me. I've found that when it comes to like what works for me personally with IDing animal bones, it's always something really weird like that, you know?
00:26:53
Speaker
that you will remember like by strictly the unscientific name, just like the distal end of Metapodials for me and the rolly bits. I just like with Metapodials, usually it's like the C and the D to tell the difference between a tarsal. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's just me like a child basically like making a letter with my hand and be like, oh, that matches. Very professional. Very great.
00:27:22
Speaker
I guess if you do have a horn sheep and a horn goat, the one way you could tell horns apart is that sheep horns tend to bend a bit more and be more parallel. Yeah. While goat horns will diverge and be like, ending more of a point and sort of curve slightly less.
00:27:43
Speaker
compared to sheep. And of course, that is more reliable with ancient breeds, because you would have had variation, but not to the point that we have today, because then, you know, we're sheep breeds now, like horn shapes have just gone wild. Another good indicator that I find is the cranial situres. So I can't pronounce stuff properly, because I never said half this stuff out loud before. It's always the case.
00:28:14
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm just, I'm looking at the school, so right now, but in the, so the cranial sutures, if you look in the occipital, so in the back of the school, in sheep and goat, you'll find that there's more of a Pentagon like shape in sheep, while the goats will have like a weird reverse Pentagon with curved sides.
00:28:37
Speaker
I'll post photos. Yeah, don't worry. This sounds like wild to anyone listening, but we will post photos so you could follow along, I guess, at home. It's because we like to make it interactive. It's not because we don't know what we're talking about.
00:28:53
Speaker
Yeah, unfortunately, we can't come to everyone's house with our reference collections. I would love to! Yeah, if anyone wants to host us, we'll come and show you exactly what we're talking about in person. Oh, we could do that, like, recorder, like, at listeners' houses. Like, today we're at Bob's house talking about dolphins. Please provide us dinner as well. That'd be great. I love free food.
00:29:20
Speaker
Well, actually, what I was going to talk about with sheep and goat remains, well, specifically sheep remains, is that, you know, we talk about this whole episode, we've been talking about how sheep and goats are so similar that it's hard to differentiate. I also find that sheep and deer can be really difficult to differentiate.
00:29:38
Speaker
or red deer and cattle. That too, yeah. But when it comes to like the mandibles especially, because you know, we don't live in a perfect world where we have nice, you know, whole intact bones, we get them in tiny little fragments, so that's the kind of stuff you end up dealing with, and fragmented at least. Sheep and deer mandibles look so similar sometimes, but at least the teeth look slightly different enough.
00:30:06
Speaker
up with the one that again a strictly unscientific indicator that I personally use to tell sheep and deer a part is that the teeth themselves they tend the sheep teeth tend to be a lot more straight edged. Yeah no that's actually something I've used. While I forgot what the name of the sign is because you have a
00:30:29
Speaker
I guess the buccal side of a deer teeth tends to be bumpier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For those at home who don't know what buckler means, just a real quick definition. It's the outside part of the mouth, not the one pointing towards the tongue.
00:30:52
Speaker
But yeah, no, that's kind of actually how I see it as well, which is super helpful. But if you get a mandible with no teeth and just like the actual shape... I mean, let's say a deer mandible tends to be more curved, I find, and sheep tend to be a bit more straighter.
00:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess like in terms of, unless you get a juvenile or something, in terms of size, if you're dealing with British archaeology at least, you don't really get fallow deer, which of course is the one whose size is perhaps closer to sheep, because then you have roe deer, but it's much too small, because red deer is much too big.
00:31:40
Speaker
and fallow deer wasn't really in the country because fallow deer is technically, we'll get to it in a later episode where fallow deer is technically native to Britain, as in it was here during the last ice age, but then went extinct. So there's been a number of rate reductions over time, but it wasn't really until the Norman period that a breeding, a viable fallow deer population was established. So if you look in sort of the earlier assemblages,
00:32:08
Speaker
You're not as likely, perhaps, to confuse deer and sheep. See, with me, lucky me, I get juvenile deer and adult sheep, so... At least you're getting wild animals. So that's wild. True. I mean, we'll probably have an episode where I talk more about the garbage that I'm going through, but... The labors of Alex. It really is, let me tell you. Honestly, that...
00:32:38
Speaker
That was just because it was a cold and stormy day at the office. It actually was today, but I mean, to be fair, I'm kind of sick of going through sheep these days. There's a lot of sheep I'm going through in my assemblage right now. But thankfully, it's now a kind of, I wouldn't say expert, I would never say I'm an expert of anything, but I'm pretty good now at ID'ing sheep and occasionally goat.
00:33:05
Speaker
that he can tell me a bit more about. Because if you're taking anything away from this episode, is that to tell apart sheep and goat requires a very keen eye and the skill that I lack. It tends to take about, I don't know, three or four cups of coffee for me to really get into it.
00:33:25
Speaker
And then of course, again, much like for any domestic art, there's also the local variation and breed variation, just to spice it up because it wasn't hard enough as it was. Yeah, like basically what we want you to take away from this episode as well as this podcast in general is that what sounds like it's kind of easy ends up being really, really difficult as you get into the nitty gritty, which of course we need to get into the nitty gritty if we want to, you know, know enough about the past, but
00:33:55
Speaker
Exactly, because as we said, they can tell us so much about the environment, the economy, and they're just cute. That's
Guest Expert Interview
00:34:06
Speaker
half the reason why I'm into Zuok, because I just love all animals. I mean, they're dead animals, so it's not like, you know...
00:34:13
Speaker
it's a nice way because I know technically we're using the animals to reconstruct the lives of past people but in the way like the reason why I got into it is more like it's for the animals themselves in a way because you give them a voice because there's been enough sort of there's been a good amount of research on you know human osteology I think that the animals just tend to be sort of left
00:34:38
Speaker
aside, no one tells the animal story. No, yeah, no, that's definitely true. I mean, even like what we were talking about with sheep and goat bones, like, we've only been like within the past couple decades that we've really gotten into differentiating between the two with different methodology. Because before that, before zero archeology was really a discipline, no one really
00:34:58
Speaker
cared enough that you would tally the number of faunal animals and kind of call it a day. So if anything, you could see this as an example of just kind of how the discipline became, you know, quote unquote, proper discipline. And I guess to give you like a very, very quick idea about how we can discern
00:35:16
Speaker
uh well gain inference and econ I just love that that sense of just gain inference um it's probably wrong as well but a good way to get information about the economy of a particular settlement um is again looking at domesticates and by looking at sheep and goats in particular by aging the animals
00:35:37
Speaker
you can actually get what is called a kill of pattern. So based on what at what age an animal was called, and also based on sex, you can sort of speculate what type of economy was practiced at the site. So say like, you have a site with a lot of sheep, but they were mostly adults when they died, chances are they were using them for war.
00:36:03
Speaker
Now, if a lot of what you find is sub-adults, so like sort of when the animal reaches an optimum way in which like, you'll gain more weight if it gets a bit older, but it's not as economically viable for the amount of extra meat you're getting in return, then you know, as I've already hinted, chances are they were using them for meat. So as soon as you get to the sub-adult stage, okay, it's big enough, it's not going to grow much more. So
00:36:30
Speaker
guess we'll just eat it. Yeah. And with milk, of course, it all sounds pretty obvious, but you'll find that a lot of the juveniles that you find are males. Because of course, they would have culled the males and kept the females for milk. But of course, there is trouble with making these assumptions because chances are settlements probably add their herds are probably multifunctional, getting different products out of them. And
00:36:57
Speaker
there is an inherent bias, because juvenile bones are quite porous, they don't preserve us well. So chances are, maybe, you know, not finding as many juveniles, not because they weren't there, they weren't part of the death assemblage, it's just they've not preserved us well. And there's a host of sort of perinatal mortality factors of just because animals just die. I mean, life was harsh enough for people, let alone the domestics that would have been kept by the people. So
00:37:26
Speaker
but just a little taste of things you could
00:37:30
Speaker
speculate and argue based on the sex and age that you get in your assemblage. Yeah and you know what in the next segment coming up we'll be having our first interview and we'll be kind of talking more about putting these kind of ideas into motion on an actual archaeological site. So we're going to take a little break and we'll be back with a nice little interview about sheep and goats. Well just sheep. Just sheep okay. No goats. I think I've talked enough about goats.
00:38:05
Speaker
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00:38:34
Speaker
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00:38:49
Speaker
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00:39:14
Speaker
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00:39:38
Speaker
So check out arccert.black for more information and level up your skill set today. That's arccert.black. Now back to the show.
00:39:53
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to RQ Animals. With you is your very lonely host, Simona Falanga. Alex has unfortunately been stricken by the plague, so she's not going to be around for this, while this interview is being recorded. Of course, you're more than welcome to send her a feel-well-soon gift. I'll suggest in the form of maybe fish bones or some pig teeth.
00:40:15
Speaker
because we know she loves them very much. You may notice that I don't sound terribly well myself and that's because I'm currently recovering from this very same plague that's been going around while the interview was being recorded but it appears I may not be torn out of my flesh prison just yet as in I won't, I'll live, I'll be fine.
Interdisciplinary Nature of Archaeogenomics
00:40:36
Speaker
But yes, today we actually have a real human guest
00:40:43
Speaker
that speaks and everything not just animals randomly meowing and trying to nibble my ear while i'm trying to record so if you'd like to say hello to our guest yeah hi my name is albina oh hello albina and thank you for coming to the show
00:40:58
Speaker
It's really like a car stressor because, as I said, I'm an orchid cucumber, but it's very exciting to have someone speak about what I think is a very fascinating subject that I personally know very, very little about, so please bear with me. Abina is here today to discuss a research titled The Horses and Sheep of the Vikings, archaeogenomics of domesticates in the North Atlantic.
00:41:23
Speaker
Yes, so I'll be if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself a little bit and telling ourselves and our listeners a bit more about you know yourself and what you do and
00:41:34
Speaker
Yeah, so my name is Alpina and I'm actually Icelandic and I'm based in Iceland. I work at the Agricultural University of Iceland, which is, I like to call it a micro university. We're not a very big university and we're mostly focused on agricultural education, but there's also research both applied and sort of
00:41:56
Speaker
curiosity driven research. But I'm also a PhD student at the University of Oslo. And that's where my project is actually sort of most of the lab work and stuff takes place there. I initially did my BA in archaeology at the University of Iceland. And then I went on to New York and did a master's in sewer archaeology. So I'm a trained sewer archaeologist and now sort of a geneticist in training, I guess. And
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah, so that's sort of, it's a very interesting sort of divide to straddle moving from the humanities to more of a, I guess, a pure sort of science field. And it's interesting, often sort of the tensions that can come up, because just the
00:42:46
Speaker
guess the traditions are so different within the humanities and then within sort of the hard sciences. And there's a lot of like, archaeologists are very wordy, all of our articles are very long and very, you know, we like to use our words. And then biologists and geneticists, they love to write articles that are like 2000 words. So it's actually it's very interesting. And sometimes really, really challenging to try to sort of
00:43:13
Speaker
meld those two disciplines and we really want the project that we're working on to be a very interdisciplinary project that is melding the best of archaeology and ancient genetics. Interdisciplinary projects are the best kind of projects really. If you just do the one thing, it gets boring after a while but it's just a breath of fresh air when you incorporate so many disciplines together and
00:43:40
Speaker
of the idea that you can always learn something new from anything and anyone regardless of their background. There's always like some opportunities to learn and
00:43:52
Speaker
not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but learning is great and interdisciplinary stuff is also great. Yeah, I always like to sometimes I've taught like kids about archaeology and I always like to say I mean the past is everything that has happened up until now and we just need all of the tools in the toolbox to understand the past and that includes humanities and heart sciences, genetics,
00:44:14
Speaker
archaeology, history, pretty much everything. We need all the tools to be able to understand the past because the past is so complicated, but it's so important for us to understand. So I really think that an archaeology in many ways, I think, is just by nature very interdisciplinary science that has always used methods from other sciences to try to work on archaeological questions.
00:44:40
Speaker
In some ways I think what's happening now with interdisciplinarity being so popular really is just like really something that had already been going on in archaeology for decades but it's just now being like sort of people are using their words more to sort of
00:44:59
Speaker
identify it in a more sort of formal way. So yeah, I feel like it's, yeah. I almost forgot as well. I want to thank you for being here, by the way, and I'm sure Alex extends her thanks. Yes, thank you for inviting me. It's great to have you here. I've really enjoyed it. I've listened to a few episodes of the podcast and I've really enjoyed it. So I think it's great. It's a good format, I think so. How have you been listening to it and still accepted to come here?
00:45:32
Speaker
Thank you very much. And that said, it would be really interesting because it's a subject that I personally know very little about because, as I mentioned in previous episodes as well, my background is in commercial archaeology. So I'm actually, technically, I'm not even a trimazoo archaeologist, I'm just really, I persevere a lot. So no, it would be very interesting. And yeah, for the
00:45:56
Speaker
listeners out there, other than my mother and Alex's mother. Bina is here to discuss her research, titled the horses and sheep of the Vikings, archaeogenomics of the domesticates in the North Atlantic. So first of all, could you please tell us a little bit more about archaeogenomics and what it involves, just for the layman like myself?
00:46:17
Speaker
Yeah, so archaeogenomics is basically, it's ancient DNA research. And what ancient DNA research is all about is using genetic methods to look at old things. So in our project, we're mostly working with bones. So bones from archaeological excavations that we then sample and do, you know, to see if there's any genetic material there. And then
00:46:44
Speaker
in the cases where we do have genetic material, which is not every bone still has any DNA left. For various reasons, some bones just don't really have any DNA and about 50% of them work. And then we take the genetic information there and
Cultural Importance of Sheep in Iceland
00:47:00
Speaker
pair the samples to each other and to modern samples as well.
00:47:05
Speaker
a sense of how the genetics of sheep and horses in the past have changed and the sort of the time frame that we're working with is sort of from the settlement of the North Atlantic so Iceland has settled around 870 and we really want to understand like where the sheep and horses that were brought to Iceland initially came from and we're also looking at the pharaohs in Greenland who were also settled by the Vikings around the
00:47:32
Speaker
ninth, tenth century. So that's sort of the goal of the project. But we also, what we are doing in our project is we're doing whole genome sequencing, which means that we're looking at the whole genome of the animal. A lot of sort of previous ancient DNA studies
00:47:50
Speaker
have only looked at the mitochondrial genome and the mitochondria are sort of the energy factories of our cells so everybody has lots of them in their cells so that's usually easier to find it's better preserved in old material than the nuclear DNA which is like all of our DNA but the
00:48:12
Speaker
The mitochondrial genome only comes from the mother's side. So you can only get sort of half of a story. But if you look at the nuclear genome, which is, I guess you can sort of say like the recipe for how to build a sheep or a human or a horse, then you get the information from both the mother and the father. And it just tells you so much more. And it has a lot more detail and more resolution than if you're only looking at the mitochondrial genome.
00:48:41
Speaker
So there haven't been any published studies of whole genome sequencing of sheep, ancient, the ancient whole genome sequencing of sheep before. There's been quite a few mitochondrial studies, which should have depending on the time period and region have been informative. But we really hope that by looking at the whole genome, we can actually tell a lot more. And we also hope
00:49:05
Speaker
to be able to understand more sort of about the traits of the animals. So for example, color or something that we'll hopefully be able to say something about. Also hornedness and pulled. So if the sheep had horns or if it didn't have horns. But we can only, like there's certain things that we can say about sort of what traits these animals in the past had. But only the traits that we know the genetic basis for. So actually ancient DNA is really
00:49:33
Speaker
really heavily reliant on the work that's been done on modern genetics of, for example, sheep. And because sheep are
00:49:42
Speaker
I mean, they're an important agricultural species and humans have been using them for thousands of years, but they're not as sort of high value as, for example, cattle, and they're not don't have the same status as horse. So there's actually somewhat less work been done on sheep genetics than, for example, on cattle and horse. So that also limits us in a little bit because we really need to have sort of this
00:50:08
Speaker
basic information we need to get from studies of modern sheep that we can then look and compare to the past. Does that make sense? It does. And also I imagine like the modern sample be huge because you have so many, even if you exclude some of the more commercial breeds and you just look at the
00:50:30
Speaker
the ancient and rare breeds. There's such a huge modern sample that we have so many weird and wonderful breeds. Where do you start? Yeah, but it's actually interesting that there's actually very, very few whole genomes of modern sheep that have been published and that are accessible online. There are really very, very few.
00:50:51
Speaker
And so we actually for our project are actually also doing some sequencing of modern Icelandic sheep, modern Faroese sheep and modern Norwegian breeds to compare to our ancient material because that that has not been published in an accessible way before. And that's actually one of the interesting things about working with
00:51:13
Speaker
a breed of animal that's currently being used in agriculture because there's lots of genetic work being done on pretty much all domestic livestock species, modern ones, for agricultural purposes. But because agriculture is an industry, so a lot of the information that comes out of that is proprietary, so we actually can't get access to it. And also, some of the ways that they... This is going to get a little bit technical. I'll try to have it
00:51:42
Speaker
not go too deep into it. But for a lot of breeding studies in modern domestic animals, people use what are called snip chips. So they are sort of designed to look at only specific parts of the genome. So they have selected the parts of the genome that are most interesting agriculturally to improve the effectiveness of breeds and so people can make more money and be more efficient in their farming and breeding.
00:52:09
Speaker
And for the sheep, the SNP chip that people use the most is a 50k SNP chip. And that actually, you know, the whole genome of the sheep is like 3.2 gigabytes or something. And 50k, that's only 50,000 SNPs. A SNP is like a single base pair in a single base in the genome.
00:52:29
Speaker
so it actually is only a tiny fragment really of the whole story so we can't really use that very much when we're trying to look into the past because it just doesn't have enough information so there's a lot of that kind of information available but actually not a lot of these sort of whole genome you know where people have seek taken a genome of a single sheep and sequenced all of it. You know this from what I understand the sort of current
00:52:55
Speaker
research and material modern breeds is almost selective. Because essentially, you're just picking out the bits that are relevant to the industry and to make the breed more efficient and make more money, but you're not necessarily looking at traits that we might be interested in seeing in archaeological terms.
00:53:15
Speaker
And then things also with sheep, like most of the genetic work that's being done now is done on, for example, merino sheep. And they are really quite far away from sort of these northern European short-tailed sheep breeds, which are always sort of considered to be, I guess, in some ways more primitive sheep breeds that have been bred less. And that would cover like the Icelandic sheep and the Faroe sheep and most of these sort of
00:53:39
Speaker
sort of local sheep breeds in the northern northwest of Europe. So it's actually very likely that some of these things that people have studied really intensively for the merino sheep just don't really translate very well when you're looking at the genetics of these north, like of these sort of short European short-tailed breeds that have not been bred so intensely and have very different properties in many ways. So
00:54:04
Speaker
So just completely out of interest. Yeah, the traditional breed say that found in Iceland, do they look anything like so the traditional British breeds that will have sort of short tail quite small? Yeah, they look so if people are familiar with soy sheep, they're kind of similar to those. Although today, actually in the 20th century, the Icelandic sheep was bred quite intensely. And, and
00:54:32
Speaker
that actually had very successful breeding programs in sort of modifying the breed to the standards, you know, to make more meat and have better wool and things like that. So actually, in Iceland now, most sheep are white, although there's also a huge variety of color still present within the breed because Icelandic farmers have always been interested in colorful sheep, even when the wool was less valuable, the colored wool.
00:55:00
Speaker
Also, Icelandic sheep are also really interesting because in Iceland we have both pulled females, so females with no horns, females with horns, pulled males and males with horns, which is unusual. A lot of modern sheep breeds are either completely pulled, so neither sex has horns,
00:55:20
Speaker
or only the males have horns for example so there's relatively few breeds that still exist that have this really sort of phenotypic variety so a large sort of
00:55:31
Speaker
lots of different looking animals with different colors and different shapes and sizes of horns and those kinds of things. So that's actually one of the really interesting things about Icelandic sheep is sort of this sort of phenotypic variability and that applies also to I guess most of the most of the Icelandic animals actually. Icelandic cow also has lots of different colors
00:55:54
Speaker
although now most of them don't have horns but horns used to be very common until the 20th century and in the Icelandic horse as well is famous for you know having multiple gates and also having lots of different colors and really huge variety in color and also a little bit of variety in size. So that's actually an interesting thing about Icelandic livestock breeds specifically is sort of this
00:56:20
Speaker
Variety and color partially because sort of systematic breeding didn't really start until the 20th century in Iceland and there was never this sort of because the breed like the we only have one sheep breed nice and then one cow breed and one horse breed.
00:56:37
Speaker
There was not like you see for example in the UK where there's maybe more regional differences and then people were sort of breeding their animals to be sort of very uniform looking in different regions and I assume this the stories is very different so it's actually there's a lot of variety
00:56:56
Speaker
which is interesting again because Iceland is fairly isolated and fairly small, you know, so you would actually expect there to be a lot of uniformity, but it's not like that. So that's one of the things that we find interesting and one of the reasons for why we're doing this research.
00:57:12
Speaker
Because I think I've read somewhere that you've taken samples from Jorvik as well. Yeah, so for the sheep, we have samples from several excavations in Iceland and in Greenland and the Faroes and Norway. And I went to York with our York Archaeological Trust, which is really nice and very helpful people there. And I took some samples from the Huntgate excavation, actually,
00:57:39
Speaker
And those samples worked really well, so we really want to compare to that as well. So that will be really interesting to see what comes out of that because on the horse work that we had done previously showed that there is this mutation in the horse genome that codes for what are called ambling gates.
00:58:00
Speaker
which the Icelandic horses is famous for and the oldest instances of this sort of mutation are found in Iceland and then also in a single specimen from York. And that date to roughly around the same time and that was actually a very unexpected result because people thought that this
00:58:19
Speaker
ambling gate mutation was a lot older and came from Mongolia and was probably thousands of years old, but it turned out to be at least the oldest instances that have been found so far are only ninth century and have only been found really in York and in Iceland in ancient horses. So that's very interesting really. Merle It would be interesting to look at also because there's a British sheep breed that is presumably introduced by the Vikings. The the Herdwick breed
00:58:49
Speaker
that's usually found sort of again in the north northeast part of England. And I'm not sure whether any studies have been done on the breed per se, but they think purely because of some written evidence that they found in some manuscripts and the very name of the sheep they think that Viking settlers have brought that breed with them. I just thought I'd throw that in there, but I actually have no idea whether any work has been done on that.
00:59:16
Speaker
Actually, like you were saying before, there are so many different types of sheep. I had actually not heard of this breed before, and I will definitely need to look into this a little bit more. I'm looking just now on Wikipedia. Actually, it doesn't look very similar to Icelandic sheep in menu. The head shape is quite different.
00:59:40
Speaker
I definitely need to look into this. But yeah, in the UK is so fascinating as well. I mean, yeah, I guess when you're driving around, you can mostly see the same breeds, but there are so many heritage breeds in the UK. Although obviously, most of them are very sort of threatened and small and stuff, but
00:59:57
Speaker
Yeah, the UK is interesting, sort of livestock breed wise, so. I've met some Sowy because they have a flock at Fengate, which is sort of a museum and it's got a reconstruction of a few Bronze Age sort of roundhouses and things in Peterborough, so in the East Midlands, I guess, and they've got a flock of Sowy, they're lovely. They're escape artists, though, apparently.
01:00:24
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine. I really like sheep and for Iceland they are just so important because basically there wouldn't be any people in Iceland than the pharaohs if it wasn't for sheep because
01:00:39
Speaker
It's not like the Inuit and Greenland, which are real experts at utilizing skin and stuff to dress themselves. In Iceland and the pharaohs, you don't have as much access to fur-bearing animals. And you really need clothes because it's cold and wet here pretty much all the time. So we really need peace to survive here. And I mean, it's also just
01:01:06
Speaker
It's interesting to me how little interest there has been in this actually in many ways because in some ways you could say that there wouldn't have been a Viking aid without sheep because you need the wool from sheep for the sales of the Viking ships.
01:01:22
Speaker
And the Vikings are, I mean, when you think of a Viking, like, I mean, the first thing I think of is a Viking ship, and you need it so much wool for the sale of a single Viking ship. So actually, you could say that there wouldn't have been any Viking age without sheep in many ways. So they really...
01:01:39
Speaker
For me, they're really key to understanding how this process worked and where these people came from and how they were able to settle in these really, in many ways, really difficult landscapes. But cheap really fit well into these island ecosystems of Iceland and the pharaohs.
01:02:00
Speaker
really well suited to this these types of landscapes and they're really so it's actually a really interesting sort of how some an animal that was domesticated you know in the Middle East how they sort of found this niche here in the North Atlantic where they really thrive.
01:02:18
Speaker
Right, just one final question that Alex and I would like to ask all of our guests. What's your favourite bone? I should probably say the sheep, Petra's bone. That's one of the bones of the skull from around the ear region. And that's actually the bone that we sample for
01:02:36
Speaker
for our ancient DNA work, and actually most people that are doing ancient DNA today are using the petris bone. And it's interesting that petris actually means stone, so it's a really hard bone, and that's why the DNA preserves really well there. But if you really pressed me, I'd have to say the sheep is dragalous. Yes!
01:02:57
Speaker
And it's just such a pretty bone. And this has all these interesting uses in the past, people use it for divination, and it just fits well in the hand. And then it's also superky. Logically, you can use it a lot for measurements. And it looks like a little toy car.
01:03:14
Speaker
I know. It's just, yeah, that's my favorite. But actually the sheep petters bone actually I like a lot as well. And I generally think that sheep have the prettiest bones. We'll allow two answers. Well, thank you very much for coming onto the show, Albina. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you everyone for listening. So we'll see you hopefully within Alex on the next episode of RQ animals. Bye. Bye bye.
01:03:43
Speaker
Hey, this is Chris from the Archeology Podcast Network. The bonus questions are available at the bonus content page at www.arcpodnet.com slash members. That's www.arcpodnet.com slash members. See you over there.
01:04:07
Speaker
Thank you for listening to RQ animals. Please subscribe and rate the podcast wherever you get your podcasts from. You can find us on Twitter at RQ animals. Also, the views expressed on the podcast are those of ourselves, the hosts and guests, and do not necessarily represent those of our institution, employers, and the RQLG podcast network. Thanks for listening.
01:04:33
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:04:55
Speaker
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