Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Who Let The Dogs Out? Animals 03
183 Plays6 years ago
The skeletal remains of dogs are simultaneously very distinct in their characteristics, but also very similar to other animals. Compare a dog skull to grey seals or foxes to see what we mean!
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Introduction and Hosts' Banter
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hey everyone, it's another episode of Archaeo Animals. Today is episode three and we're talking all about dogs.
00:00:27
Speaker
So hi again, everyone. This is Archio Animals. I'm your host, Alex Fitzpatrick, and with me, as always, Simona Franga. And today we are going to hit that age-old question, which is, in fact, who let the dogs out. We'll be doing a step-by-step process, trying to navigate who, in fact, let the dogs out, and should be good.
Special Guest: Sandy the Dog
00:00:52
Speaker
Or we're going to be talking about dog bones, probably the latter. A lot of dog bones and weird dog skulls. But you've got to mention that we have indeed a guest of honor with us tonight. Oh, we do have a guest. Our first guest. Yes, a very important guest because my dog Sandy sat right next to me. She's more of a quiet observer. She's very quiet, bless her. I can feel the vibe. The vibe is there.
00:01:21
Speaker
So, I feel blessed, to be honest. The good, silent, quiet vibe of Sandy. Surprising for a dog, from what I know about dogs, to be honest. Yeah, and I think she's only barked once, and she's scared herself. So, that was her experience with barking.
Identifying Dog Bones in Archaeology
00:01:41
Speaker
But let's talk about dead dogs. So, dog bones. How do we identify them? What do we do with them? All that kind of stuff and more for today's episode. So, I mean, I don't know about you, but I feel like dog bones are pretty, what's the word, characteristic. I think you could more or less ID them if you find them in assemblage pretty easily. Yeah, I would agree with that.
00:02:08
Speaker
because also like the sort of stick out because being used to sort of more farm animals and your sheep and your cow and horse sort of, it makes for quite a nice change as well. And you're like, oh, doggo. So it stands out a fair bit.
00:02:20
Speaker
And we love dogs so much, so of course you're going to be so excited to see a dog. Nuskas with dog bones, although they're not uncommon, they're not terribly common either. True, that is true. So it's a nice change from the umpteenth sheep. Yeah, I mean, I think last episode when we talked about domestic animals, it's one of those things you would file under kind of average in a domestic assemblage, but you know, it's not a sheep, it's not a cow, so it's pretty exciting to be honest.
00:02:49
Speaker
Essentially, it's the 10% of zoo archaeology. The 90% is solidly on the farm animals of what you get. And then you have the 10% of the pretty and unusual things. Yeah, 10% for pretty and unusual things. 9% dogs are cats, then 1% something really out there, for sure. So yeah, who did in fact let the dogs out? Long story short, nobody knows.
Dog vs Wolf Bones: A Challenge
00:03:16
Speaker
I wish I could do a- End of the podcast, end credits! I wish, oh man, I kind of regret not doing a dog-based PhD project, because I'd love to have just made that the title. There's none of dogs in my assemblage to make that my title. Just nobody knows.
00:03:37
Speaker
Probably won't know for a while yet. But the only thing I would say, though, is that dog bones are definitely different from other animals. I think you could... If you looked at a dog bone versus, let's say, cow bone or something, there's enough characteristic differences that it's pretty easy to differentiate between the two. It's a medium-sized animal, things like that. Teeth, definitely, though. I love dog teeth. As someone who doesn't usually like animal teeth, dog teeth are so cool.
00:04:05
Speaker
Oh, no, I really like dog teeth. And also thing one that really gives it away is the humorous as well. Ah, true. Yeah, I wasn't thinking about that. So I guess for a way, I know this is a podcast, but let's see if we can describe it to the audience. What a dog humorous looks like. We'll definitely add pictures, but
00:04:24
Speaker
If I remember the terms more like... I've got some bones hanging out on the desk here to try and sort of visualise them a bit better when I try to describe them. It's not like I can do any better. The distal end of the humerus, is that a fossa? What's it called? Something like that. You're asking the wrong person who, if it was up to me, I would describe everything as something curvy, something straight, something round.
00:04:53
Speaker
But dog humor- My favorite thing is that it's in metapodials, I'd just say like the distal ender, just call it the rolly bits. They're like the roller. Yeah, I feel like dog bones have a very like curve type of look to them that I think sets them apart in a lot of ways from say, you know, cervids or sheep or something like that. But definitely the teeth. Dog teeth have this kind of like wave-like shape, have you noticed that? Like the molars for certain.
00:05:22
Speaker
that are really cool. I love them like that is I find that so much nicer than let's say, the horrible shutter looking teeth that like horse have. One thing that I really like about dogs as well as the incisors
00:05:38
Speaker
Ah, yeah, that is true. Well, because I guess you'll be clean it, but I guess they're more prominent in dogs, so they've got this comb-like shape. Yeah, yeah. They're sort of scraping meat, unless I'm very much mistaken. So I quite like it. Yeah, no, it's really nice. And to be honest, the only thing you can really mix up dogs with is wolves, but we'll get to that later. And foxes, I think, are pretty similar too.
00:06:05
Speaker
Well, especially because if you get sort of smaller breeds of dog because that's when when identification gets a little tricky. Yeah, because the further ahead in time you go, the more variety you get in dog breeds. So you can add anything from a big sort of Irish war found type dog to a very tiny sort of lap dog, which could get confused with a fox.
00:06:29
Speaker
Yeah, definitely there's a lot of similarities. I find myself occasionally tripping over that. And we'll get more into breeds later because I'm sure we'll need a solid segment of the podcast just to yell about breeds. That's one of the frequently asked questions as well.
00:06:45
Speaker
So it'll be a good one to discuss later on. But yeah, also, wolves versus dogs, you know, I mean, the slight differences there really make it kind of difficult. Right now, I'm currently kind of fighting between an identification of a specimen I have. Is it a dog? Is it a wolf? It's very close to either or. It's driving me up the wall, to be honest. So new species.
00:07:09
Speaker
Wolf dog. A mystical being from another dimension. Well, the problem, of course, is that whether or not it's a dog or a wolf, it really changes kind of what your assemblage is because dogs, again, are more associated with domestic sites, things like that, wolves and more of a wild animal. So it's important to kind of make those distinctions in a lot of ways.
00:07:32
Speaker
Actually, do you know what's funny is what I found recently is what's really close to dogs are seals. I guess they would be because they don't call them the dogs of the sea sort of thing.
00:07:44
Speaker
They really are the dogs they see. There's a slight differentiation in, obviously, the actual limbs because, you know, seals have little flipper-type things and dogs don't. But when it comes to the skull and the teeth especially, they're actually really similar. And it kind of surprised me. I couldn't believe how similar they were.
00:08:07
Speaker
It's super cool. Is it gray seals that have more dog-like teeth? With harbor seals, they have sort of that wavy structure, like in the premolars, but sort of a lot more accentuated.
Dog Bones vs Other Animals
00:08:21
Speaker
So they literally look like they've got tiny combs that are more adapted to a fish diet.
00:08:26
Speaker
in a doggo. Also, they'll be quite important to distinguish between dog and seal. Of course, on a coastal site, you're more likely to get seal, but then if you find seal remains in the middle of the Midlands, that gets a little bit more interesting.
00:08:47
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, again, it kind of just ties into this idea of like, just having these similar bones, you really need to smack down on like what the comp-
00:08:58
Speaker
I went on a weird train of thought that ended up me talking about wrestling, basically. You basically have to really nail down a confirmation of a species because if you have, let's say, some kind of dog fragment, then maybe seal, maybe fox, maybe wolf. I mean, those are like four different sites you're talking about right there, for sure.
00:09:19
Speaker
Well, especially it changes everything so that if you're looking at earlier sort of paleolithic sites, when it comes down to pinning down who, in fact, did let the dogs out, as we discussed previously, could say if we have a specimen from 130,000 years ago that was misidentified and wasn't wolf, it was actually dog.
00:09:38
Speaker
that could change a fair amount about what we know about our relationship with dogs. Oh yeah, it would change everything. So let's talk more about kind of like dog adjacent things because again, I think we're going to need the full segment to talk about dog breeds. You know, one of the other things you associate with dogs is, you know,
00:09:59
Speaker
dog chewing, which I think we talked a little bit about in previous episodes, but dogs have a very unique kind of signature they leave behind if they're gnawing on bones, don't they? Oh, so like furrow-like impressions on the bone, I find, and also like tooth marks as well. Not to mention, like, I really like that the slobber ends up making it really shiny, like, it's disgusting. I haven't noticed that yet myself, although I am just randomly giving Sandy
00:10:28
Speaker
bits of cow ribs and whatnot. So we'll see what she comes up with in a couple of months time. Let's talk about that because you're doing a little experimental archaeology with your dog. More like experimental boredom. More like it's just
00:10:43
Speaker
But still, it ties into what we're talking about. It's one of the ways that do archaeology progresses with experimental archaeology like this, and it helps to know what do these bones look like when they're not up by other animals. That's not gone, undergone 2,000 years of taphonomic processes. It's still interesting.
00:11:05
Speaker
don't know, just try to isolate to the one so you can identify what dog tooth marks would actually look like without all the stuff that probably happened on top of it, sort of in 2000 years of just being burned underground. But I thought like, I'm sure there's plenty of material about it. It's sort of like experimental work on dog tooth marks, but I just thought I'd have a little fun. And, you know, Sandy does need entertaining, and she loves chewing on things. So we regularly just get presents from one of her best friend, a butcher,
00:11:36
Speaker
she gets a variety of bones to gnaw on for like cow femurs and limbs. She's had a fair few ribs and a pig foot which I have no idea where it's gone to but she buries them you see.
00:11:51
Speaker
Sometimes they're a bit too tough for her to chew on, so she'll go and bury them somewhere, wait for them to decompose a little, and then she'll dig them back up and chew on them later. You know what's weird is I'm actually thinking about it after you said it. I've never really seen a study on the archaeology of dog-burying behaviours.
Avoiding Modern Biases
00:12:10
Speaker
There probably is some that exist, but I mean, I don't know.
00:12:15
Speaker
something to think about? No, I've never come across anything like that myself. But then unfortunately, as I haven't been in academia for a fair few years now, I don't really have access to those publications. So there'll be a mystery that will be uncovered another time.
00:12:31
Speaker
I'm too busy to look at it, let's be real. Just kidding, I'm not busy at all. But yeah, no, it's actually just something I guess realistically it would be difficult to kind of figure out. I don't know, this is like something I do a lot where I have these grand ideas of why don't someone do an archaeology of blah blah blah, then think about the logistics and go, oh, that's why. Because it's hard.
00:12:54
Speaker
It'll still be interesting to look at, because if you were to come across, say, a postal that had a couple of bones just stashed in there and looked sort of regular enough, but not quite in shape. So I wonder whether it's just a dog burrowing things for later. So I would eventually just make it by a turbation. Dogs are secretly the archaeologist, just anime.
00:13:13
Speaker
Oh no, nothing beats the Badgers, the great archaeologist, because the amount of archaeologist remains that Badgers have dug up unintentionally over the years. Badgers are pretty close to dog skulls, aren't they? Am I misremembering? Ish, the teeth can be deceiving as well. At first glance, if you don't really look at it, if you just find a tooth or some fragmented parts of the maxilla, you might just be like, oh yeah, dog.
00:13:39
Speaker
and put it to one side and then you look at it sometime later be like oh badger because it's just it doesn't really come to mind because usually when you deal sort of day-to-day domestic assemblages you don't really think of coming across a badger mm-hmm so yeah you just see it you don't even think fox necessarily just you know you're working on a Roman side do you find that a partial school be like oh dog and you don't really give it too much thought until then yeah of all the haha moments later
00:14:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's that bias, I guess, really. I mean, I feel like this might be something we'll talk about in a future episode on, say, exotic animals, but it's hard to shake that kind of, all right, well, it's either gonna be a sheep, a cow, a horse, a dog mentality, I feel like when you first get an assemblage, you know? Well, exactly. If you find, say, like, horse or like,
00:14:32
Speaker
equid. Like I said, are you pronouncing it equid remains? You're not necessarily you're gonna think oh yeah, I found some horse you're not gonna think oh what if it's a donkey or a mule or even though there is evidence in this country at least in the Roman period of donkeys being there and mules as well.
00:14:48
Speaker
Although, luckily, the mules didn't seem to have been bred here, they were just imported, if I remember correctly. But we'll get into it in a future episode, I'm sure. Yeah, we're really bad. We're really bad at jumping the gun, aren't we? Yes, always. Yeah, I'm sure we can make a smash cut of every time we accidentally jump the gun in the wrong episode. I'm sure that would be funny at some point. But yeah.
00:15:16
Speaker
Basically, there's more, I feel like as we've been talking, I've been realizing more and more how many more animals are pretty similar in osteological composition to dogs, even though I started this episode off by saying dogs are really, you know, distinguishable characteristically, like,
00:15:37
Speaker
No, but I think in archaeology you can end pretty much every sentence with a, but not quite at the end. That is true. I think that should be the disclaimer for everything that I personally write, but not quite. At the end of every paper, like, oh, the domestication of the dogs finally pinned down.
00:15:58
Speaker
But not quite. It's a picture of someone shrugging, basically. That's all of archaeology. If anyone listens to this podcast and they're not archaeologists and don't want to get into it, if you really want to know what archaeology is like, just think of someone shrugging next to a dirt pile.
Challenges in Identifying Breeds
00:16:14
Speaker
That's pretty much accurate, for sure.
00:16:18
Speaker
just, yeah, shrug, ritual, but not quite. And if you want to be a zoo archaeologist, just imagine someone doing the shrug, but they're holding like a sheep skull on one hand and a goat skull on the other. It's basically it. I was just shrugging. I forget this isn't a video channel. Just saying they're shrugging. I was shrugging the dogs falling asleep and
00:16:44
Speaker
All right, I think that does it for this first segment of the podcast. We'll take a little bit break and we'll be back to listen to Simona talk about dog breeds for like a solid three hours.
00:17:01
Speaker
network is listener supported. We're trying to move away from paid advertising while also creating new shows and supporting the ones we have. The APN has never and will never make a serious profit on our podcast. Every little dime we make goes back into the network and improving show quality. So become a member today at www.arcpodnet.com slash members.
00:17:19
Speaker
to show your support, get some extras, and be a benefactor for archaeological education. Members get stickers, a coffee mug, a t-shirt, bonus content, early access to episodes, a private Slack team to talk to other members and the hosts, and full access to training on Team Black over at arccert.black. So check out our memberships at www.arcpodnet.com slash members today and support archaeological education. That's www.arcpodnet.com slash members. Now back to the show.
00:17:50
Speaker
Alright, and welcome back to Archaeo Animals. Today we're talking about dogs for episode three. So now we're gonna just give the mic to Simona. So Simona, how do you feel about dog breeds? And what can we tell about dog breeds based on the skulls? Ah, the other spot now. Well, dog breeds are beautiful. I love many dogs, all dogs are beautiful.
00:18:19
Speaker
Um, but I guess seriously, though, I guess one question that I do get quite often is whether we can differentiate between dog breeds and the archaeological record. In short, the answer is just no. Unfortunately, not. Because I mean, in the past, they would have had a variety of dog breeds a lot more than you'd actually think. But they would have looked nothing like what
00:18:49
Speaker
they look today and I might have to start the whole thing again because I'm sort of moving along with myself. Yes, there are differences between different dog breeds from a skeletal point of view. Can we necessarily pinpoint a specific breed from samples from the archaeological record? Unfortunately, not yet, or probably just not.
00:19:14
Speaker
Because if you think about it, even breeds that are present today, we would struggle to recognise 100 years ago. Yeah. So I've had a little bit of digging, ha ha. Like dogs digging, ha ha. And archaeology digging. Oh, that was a couple of sources.
00:19:34
Speaker
I've read up a little bit about how dog breeds have changed over time. We're not talking a massive span of time. We're talking about in the last 100 to 150 years. You'll have, I don't know, a prime example is the British Bulldog, which in the 1800s looked quite different than what it does today because it would have had a relatively long
00:19:55
Speaker
muzzle, which is the exact opposite of what it looks like now. And if you are very that keen and not faint of heart, do Google a photo of a British bulldog skull and shrug.
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, they're pretty bad. So let's, I have a couple of pictures that you've asked me to look up. And let's just go through them. So let's talk about Bulldogs. First of all, we know you talked about a little bit, but just looking at a modern bulldog skull right now. Where to begin?
00:20:32
Speaker
Why is it alive? How is it alive? That's kind of like the running trend with a lot of these breed skull things is that, oh my god, we'll put pictures of a lot of these breeds or links to pictures of them in the show notes so you can all take part of the horror that we are all experiencing right now.
00:20:59
Speaker
Because I think that the issue of what's happening that that's my personal opinion, but in the way, of course, we have selected.
00:21:06
Speaker
the breeding of dogs for thousands of years.
Critique of Modern Dog Breeding
00:21:10
Speaker
So you know, breeds that they're not a thing of today, like because of the dog fancy, like the Romans, the people in the Iron Age would have had dog breeds. But I think what has changed over time is that we stopped breeding for function. And we started breeding for looks or primarily for looks because I'm sure like back in the Roman period, they would have also bred for specific looks and what was more pleasing to them. But it's just now
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, so like we do have a few sort of working dog lineages, but we're mostly trying to please the public about what they find cute by their beauty standards.
00:21:46
Speaker
So now, sort of a jeopardizing health of the animal in the process. And also that's really what the problem is, is that there is a market for it. They're made because people are there. That's okay. Well, so back to the bulldog. I'm looking at it for people who may not want to look at it, which I understand it's a bit much.
00:22:09
Speaker
uh it's got to what is going on with that uh that mandible huh yeah this particular sort of morphology that is found in some dog breeds and cat breeds it's called like brachycephalic okay so sort of this exaggerated lower jaw and almost like pointing upwards or like the sort of like you get them when the face is sort of squished up
00:22:31
Speaker
which could also in some breeds result to a sort of domed skull because you get you get that in dogs and cats as well. So like Persian, like some like the Persian or some oriental breeds after as well, but that you have the exact opposite in some of the newer Siamese breeds with a very long
00:22:49
Speaker
snout and I'm sure you get there with some sight hounds, even though I'm not sure how unhealthy that is, in fact, whether it's just a feature of the animal and it's just happy as Larry. Yeah, I can definitely see the domed thing in a lot of these pictures of English bulldogs I'm looking at right now. It's, I can understand, I'm, I wouldn't be surprised if some people found bulldog skulls in the past, like, you know, recent paths and thought they were aliens, to be honest, because
00:23:18
Speaker
Oh, another one's a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Oh my gosh, that is... Huh. So again, to describe for anyone who's maybe not brave enough or strong enough morally and spiritually to look at this, it's teeny. Why it's so small, though? Very domed. It looks like a tennis ball.
00:23:46
Speaker
very weird tennis ball. Yeah, it's very small. I can't imagine.
00:23:51
Speaker
Like, it's just, like, imagine, trying to imagine living like that is kind of, it makes me want to never adopt a dog ever again. It's very, and then there's pictures of the, of the, uh, spaniel, like, uh, with, you know, I was gonna say, a flesh spaniel, which is very upsetting. But you know what I mean, it's a, it's got all of its bits on, it's not just a skeleton, and it's so cute, but then...
00:24:17
Speaker
Yikes. Now you also told me to look up a bull terrier skull, which I have now. What the actual hell is that?
00:24:28
Speaker
popular, but I'm not sure how to describe the way the skull looks now, but like the way that the snout is tilted downwards. It's weird, because it almost looks like, you know, kind of what you would say is the prototypical dog that you would find in archaeological deposits, except for the fact that it tilts like that. You know what I mean? Like, it's almost right.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, but if you look at photos of it, like some of ball terriers from say, like 150 years ago, the tilt sort of disappears, and not only the school's relatively flat, but it also turned ever so slightly upwards. And in the space of 150 years, it tilted to almost 45 degrees. Oh my gosh, that is absolutely wild. Why that I do not know. Yeah.
00:25:17
Speaker
readers. If anyone knows please write to us.
00:25:22
Speaker
I mean, I don't know if I want to know, it'll just make me sad. But yeah, again, for those of you who, you know, aren't looking at a picture, again, you're stronger than I am, I have to look at these things. And it's basically almost there. But it's got, it's, I guess, what would you call that in actual grown up? We're the wrong people to host this new archaeology podcast.
00:25:51
Speaker
approximate zooarchaeology. Well, I guess that'd be the rostrum. Sure. There's gonna be real zooarchaeologists who like real like real osteologists who know what they're talking about, listen to this, and they're all gonna have conniptions. And for that, I'm sorry. Yeah, exactly. That's, that's our new catchphrase is shrug. Yeah, but the avatars, the tagline also
00:26:15
Speaker
But yeah, it's just, it's so wild. If you look at, you know, the kind of archaeological dog skulls that we find, let's say, here in Britain, and then compare it to the kind of breeding that we have now, it's wild, the changes, and that they all kind of stem from, you know, whatever.
00:26:35
Speaker
They'll descend from the wolf. Yes, even the chihuahua. Yeah, and my have things changed, honestly. It's a bit wild, for sure.
Future Archaeological Insights from Dogs
00:26:45
Speaker
So the other thing you told me to look up, and I have seen this before, but you've made me look at it again, is a pug skull. Now that's the one that I think everyone should look up. It is, oh god, it's like a combination of all the other skulls that we've been talking about, for sure.
00:27:04
Speaker
probably one of the worst of the lot because it has at all, it's got an incredibly pronounced dome scope and that sort of brachycephalic trait.
00:27:16
Speaker
also I guess because the skull is so domed, they don't get much in the way of a sagittal crest either. Because of course any dog, any dog breed can grow one, but if the skull is sort of too domed, there's really no way for them to grow one properly. Which I guess would mean like telling male from female be a headache. But headache, we're talking about skulls.
00:27:41
Speaker
everything's a joke to me. But just to explain to anyone else who may not understand what a sagittal crest is, the sticky outy thing at the top of the crane.
00:27:52
Speaker
I don't mean to put you on the spot. I'm very bad at explaining things, too. I feel like it's one of those things where it's like, you know what it is, but if anyone asks you to explain it, you'd be like, it's that thing. And then you vaguely point to it. Essentially that. And also, like, everyone's gonna have to bear with me today because I'm pretty sure I've got heat exhaustion and I'm somewhat dying in a corner. I think everyone is the cats under the bed dying and the dogs dying on the floor. We're all dying. Wow, this got morbid fast and we're podcast about dead things.
00:28:23
Speaker
Oh god, yeah. Full disclosure over all of our podcast episodes for a while, we are recording them in the middle of a, what I'd say is a heatwave, or the new normal, I guess, where we're all just dying of heat. Speaking of dying, let's go back to dead animals.
00:28:45
Speaker
So yeah, the poke skull is just, it's everything. It's that domed cranium, it's the big upturned thing. The teeth are like, the teeth are like my teeth and I have to go get my teeth fixed in like two weeks.
00:28:59
Speaker
It's a bit much. It's just why? Yeah, no, exactly. That's the usual go to reaction, just why? And I mean, like, you would know better than I do, like, the kind of like health implications these kind of shaped skulls would have. Well, in the particular case of the pug, they just really have difficulty breathing.
00:29:19
Speaker
Yeah, they're very loud. People that I know that have lost their pugs, they were treated exceptionally well. So there was no fault on the owners part whatsoever. And they'll have them just randomly stop breathing in the back of the car. And that was that. But then what did they do? They bought themselves another one. And I was just like face palming.
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah, but again, it ties into what you were saying before in that, you know, the history of dog breeding has kind of moved from more of a functional type of focus to a more aesthetic focus, which isn't necessarily, you know, good, or healthy for the dog. There's good ways and bad ways of doing it. Yeah. Essentially, like, by all means, do breed for looks.
00:30:04
Speaker
but not at the cost of health. And also I think that if people were more aware what the health risks were for certain breeds they probably wouldn't be as prone to go and buy one, hopefully.
00:30:20
Speaker
This is, in future archaeologists, this is going to be a point of, like, you know, this could be a way for people, future archaeologists, if, you know, the Earth still exists in a thousand years, and people still exist in a thousand years, given that we all haven't exploded in heat, that, you know, they'll be, they might be able to, like, kind of pinpoint periods of time based on, like, breeding, you know what I mean?
00:30:45
Speaker
Yeah, to allow breeds of yeah, well, because they'll have a lot more things like photographs and things, I'm sure they'll be able to date things based on the emoticons that we used. Yeah, but like, even removing all that, if you let's say, you know, like a y2k situation happens, everyone's internet, like computers and electronics all explode. And we all have to like live without that kind of stuff for the rest of our lives, like future archaeologists would be able to still see I feel like,
00:31:13
Speaker
they kind of trends in breeds, like the way we breed dogs, how they look, how it changes all the time. I don't think they would do, and probably just mispronounce things wildly. Sorry, just a flash for like Fallout New Vegas keeps coming in my mind with Caesar being called Kaiser, like anyone else. Oh yeah, that is true, yeah. I was actually just talking about that the other day, a bit of a tangent I guess, yes, but...
00:31:41
Speaker
Although in Fallout, they do, dogs still exist in the future. So we have that to look forward to. And they seem to be in the similar breeds that we have. Merle And they do have sort of a half cyborg dogs as well. Sarah Yeah, they do have. Merle Yeah, that one is called Rex. They're sort of half German Shepherd and half sort of bionic, weird mess. Sarah Do you ever get jealous of future archaeologists? Because imagine if they get to find like cyborgs,
00:32:06
Speaker
And that would be metal as hell, man. That would be so cool. I want to- It would be maybe not of our period. I don't think I'd enjoy digging our time period. Nah. I think about that a lot. I mean, just the future of archaeology. And I feel like maybe this will be a future episode, just like the future of zoo archaeology, because I don't know. I like daydreaming and I like not thinking about the hellscape we live in right now. Absolutely.
00:32:33
Speaker
But yeah, so if anyone out there is really interested and want to, uh, you know, I know I'm tempting, I'm tempting everyone with this, but if you find some even weirder looking dog breed skulls, feel free to send it to us on our Twitter at ArceoAnimals, cause, um...
00:32:53
Speaker
I don't know. We hate ourselves. So please. Yeah, we hate ourselves and we want to see something awful. So just send us the worst looking dog skull you can find. Who knows? Maybe we'll do a bonus episode one of these days where we just cry over the horrible dog skulls that we've been sent.
00:33:11
Speaker
I love Tempting Fate, if you haven't noticed. I just want it to happen. But yeah, if you're brave, definitely look up some of these skulls. Bull Terriers, Bulldogs, Pugs, and what was the other one? The King Charles Spaniel.
00:33:31
Speaker
They both look a bit odd, but the cavalier looks odd. Oh, I just, I just looked that up. That's awful. I mean, it's not, they're both bad. Yeah. And I think I don't remember how it went exactly. So feel free to call me on it. But I think it's with a cavalier.
00:33:49
Speaker
you had the King Charles Spaniel. And at one point in time, it was Braxton Valley with a short muzzle, but then those were sort of the most sickly animals. So they got bred out and they had more healthier looking animals. And then someone like people start to complain that they didn't look like the old type anymore. So they went to bread back to that again. And that became the breed standard. I was like, Come on.
00:34:14
Speaker
be like, oh, I would have normally got rid of those. Oops, good, I'll breed some more. There's a lot to answer for with a lot of these skulls that we're looking at.
Evolution of Dog Breeds in Britain
00:34:29
Speaker
Just to briefly go back on identifying dog breeds in the archaeological record, because I could assure to know we can't. But the reason why we get the course because
00:34:40
Speaker
as we mentioned, dog breeds have changed a fair deal over time. And also even if we find skulls that sort of resemble to present day breed, really all we can say is like, is sort of deer hound like, say for example, because morphologically, they may indeed look quite similar, but that won't necessarily mean that
00:35:01
Speaker
it is the same brick because we have no information on the coat colour or temperamental tail. It's close enough. Close enough. So usually I think in papers or certainly in academic papers, they tend to, if they really have to, just mentioning a border collie like
00:35:20
Speaker
Yeah. So just to help you visualize what sort of dog like it may have looked like ish, but not quite. So yeah, hopefully we haven't scared you all off. But we're going to take another break. And when we come back, we'll be talking about some specific case studies about dogs and not about scary dog skulls this time. But not quite.
00:35:49
Speaker
Are you tired of the webinars and training offered by the big organizations not being free for members and not really covering what we need? Team Black has the answers. Check out arxert.black forward slash main for our upcoming webinar schedule. All of our webinars happen once a month and seating is limited. Learn everything from field tech basics to drones to digital workflows. We have more classes coming online every month. Classes are always one hour and cost just $20.
00:36:14
Speaker
Classes like building a CV and getting a job are always free. That's right. We'll help you get a job, then we'll be here when you want to level up your skills. If you are a professional subscriber to the APN at arkpodnet.com slash members, then you get all of Team Black's offerings for free as part of your membership. We have Team Black memberships coming that will give the same for the APN. So $20 a month gets you all the APN swag and extras plus free training from Team Black. So check out arkcert.black for more information and level up your skill set today. That's arkcert.black.
00:36:57
Speaker
Hey, podcast fans and digital archaeologists. Have you heard about WildNote? It's a data collection app that works online or offline on your smartphone or tablet, iOS or Android. It allows you to collect field data easily, manage data efficiently, and generate data reports and site records effortlessly. We have a growing list of state site forms built in for your use and some generic forms that will work anywhere. Check out the shovel testing and photograph forms.
00:37:21
Speaker
You can get a free all-access 30-day trial today by going to WildNoteApp.com. That's WildNoteApp.com for your free 30-day trial. Now back to the show.
00:37:38
Speaker
Alright, and we're back with episode three of Archaeo Animals, and today we're still talking about dogs. And I guess now we're gonna just talk about a couple of specific case studies of dogs. I mean, dogs are, like we said,
00:37:55
Speaker
both common and uncommon, if that makes sense. So there's a couple of my couple, I mean, a lot of different case studies that you can really look into. Simona, do you want to start off by talking about your hounds of Britannia? So yeah, it sounds more interesting than it actually is. But I thought it'd be nicer to discuss
00:38:16
Speaker
how was specifically sort of in the British archaeological record, because that's sort of what I tend to work with, how you see sort of dog variation changing over time. And of course, the greatest degree of variation is seen in the Roman period, because of course, like during the Iron Age, people still had a fair amount of dogs. But they tend to be sort of more generic in the way they looked morphologically. And they only had sort of very few different types. But literally when the
00:38:46
Speaker
contacts to the Roman Empire later with the invasion of Rome, sort of the country exploded with different dog breeds. Of course, as we discussed earlier, we can't really discern breed based on archaeological material. So really, all we've got to go by is what the remains themselves, but also the descriptions that we find in the written record.
00:39:10
Speaker
So, for example, one interesting publication that sort of uses bits of them of written sources from the Roman period describing hunting dogs in particular, and I think that's just throughout the Roman Empire, not just Britain, is, yeah, this 1951 publication called Assessio Lechez-Roman.
00:39:28
Speaker
And that's sort of quite interesting. It's fancy because it's not in English. It's again, it sounds more interesting. It is an interesting publication of dogs with ancient or long dead dogs.
00:39:45
Speaker
are your jam. So of course, you can look at the written record of publications that collated the written record, and also artistic representation of dogs safer like statues and mosaics. And of course, you don't get many of those in Britain per se. I mean, there's like one place like the place for dog bronze statues. And that's the Temple of Nodence in Gloucestershire. That's a fourth century temple that
00:40:13
Speaker
like a plethora of sort of dog bronze figurines have come out of it. And so like, we'll probably get into it a bit later on a different episode when we talk about ritual a little bit more, but that's been interpreted with the status being ritual offerings from the pilgrims for the whole thing that dogs sort of are associated as agents of healing during that time period. Nevermind that, tangent off. Back to Roman doggers when the Romans sort of settled in Britain. So yeah, the
00:40:43
Speaker
we got a much wider variety of breeds. And actually, according to several sort of sources from the time period, one of Britain's main export was actually dogs. And the British hounds being very highly priced. So among like still looking at the record, one of the sort of very like highly priced dogs was a breed called the Agassians.
00:41:06
Speaker
however that's meant to be pronounced, which was a lean, which was a very lean, rough breed, that it was indeed quite small, sort of a lean, but also very strong and swift. Then they would have the Scottish Icanis, just sort of like an Irish hound. Irish Wolfhound like dog, and you would have had Molossians or Molossian type breeds that make an appearance as guard dogs.
00:41:32
Speaker
So also, so you'd have had your hunting dogs that would have hunted anything from a hare to deer and wobble.
00:41:41
Speaker
you'd have your guard dogs that became quite popular in the Roman period just for like home guarding. You're herding dogs that were of course very popular and widespread because they would have played a vital role on the farmstead. They would have guarded the flock from thieves, predators and all sorts of things. And yeah,
00:42:05
Speaker
lots and lots of different types of dogs. And you see them in the remains. And of course, they would have been mostly sort of practical in their morphology, because they all had a job to do, with the exception of pet dogs that also really made an appearance from the start of the Roman period. People started importing pet dogs, what lap dogs that will just sit and most likely Yeah,
00:42:30
Speaker
So they were there as well. And you find them sort of extensively reproduced sort of in more artistic representations as well. I should do with sort of some of the hunting dogs as well, because then the sort of Irish war found like dogs that was describing earlier, I found a fair amount on sort of hunting cups. Oh, okay. But they usually it's, it's
00:42:55
Speaker
This type of wear was popular in the second century and it was usually decorated in the barber teen or barber tine. Again, I don't know if you've pronounced it. So we'll tell us in the comments. Yes, please, please tell me how to pronounce stuff in the comments. The essential with barber teen, it's an ethic.
00:43:15
Speaker
clay slip that gets molded onto the pot surface to get this sort of spare relief or this relief decoration and you have this hunting cups that they usually got a black slip in colour and they've got well as the name says hunting scenes and they quite frequently feature these type of sort of very lean and large
00:43:34
Speaker
hunting dogs, usually hunting either a hare or a deer, you find them sort of all over the country and all over so the northwestern provinces of Rome, really. But long story short, yes, the hounds of Britannia, plentiful and varied. Yeah, you know, another case study kind of to
00:43:53
Speaker
It's kind of to just springboard off of that. Usually on this podcast, we try to bring up case studies that are easily accessible to our audience, whether they're academics or not academics. But in this case, I do want to just talk about Adrian Chadwick's work, which his
00:44:16
Speaker
article can be found in a book called The Materiality of Magic, which is a really great edited volume. If you can get your hands on that, I'll put all the information down in the show notes. But basically, the paper kind of talks about
00:44:33
Speaker
the connections that dog remains have with ritual, which is kind of what you were talking about as well. And how there's this kind of phenomenon of finding the dog remains in Romano, British wells, and how that you know, there's this idea that it might be linked to
00:44:51
Speaker
Cerberus, the third-headed dog, and Guardian of the Underworld and things like that. Dogs being found in kind of liminal spaces, like in ditches or doorways. And again, I will put the information in the show notes if you want to read about that. But again, just another kind of additional note to what you're talking about in that, you know, dogs are kind of associated with this kind of ritual
00:45:18
Speaker
kind of idea that ends up correlating into, you know, being immortalized in art and
Ritual and Emotional Bonds with Dogs
00:45:25
Speaker
kind of treated differently after death, things like that. Merle Absolutely. Especially if you look at our special animal deposits, so like, sort of animal deposits other than just your usual road and mill food waste, dogs tend to feature a lot more prominently. So in a way, like dogs are not very common in the archaeological record overall,
00:45:46
Speaker
But percentage-wise, if you look at special animal deposits, then dogs are incredibly common. Yes, definitely. And again, we will have a whole episode, or maybe two, depending on how much we have to say. There might be a lot about ritual, because there's a lot you can say about animal ritual, and there's definitely a lot that I, and you can say, you and I. Oh my gosh, this is why I'm not an English major.
00:46:12
Speaker
Another article that I found while perusing that will also be in the show notes, if you'd like to take a gander, I don't know if you saw this, Simona, it was kind of recent. A couple months ago, there was this whole big thing from the Mesoamerican archaeology side of things where they uncovered what seemed to be, quote unquote, Mayan rituals and how dogs and cats may have been either venerated or sacrificed or something like that.
00:46:43
Speaker
Oh, yeah, was it the one with Chihuahua-like dogs and not just like cats, but actual big cats and ganyas that seem to have just been kept there? Yeah, I'm trying to look at the article again. And I've apparently reached my article limit on the Economist. So that's helpful. I hate paywalls. It's such a thing. I don't even look at the Economist. Anyway,
00:47:08
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, so again, there's this, you know, dogs seem to be almost ubiquitously linked to ritual. And I wonder if that has to do with the fact that, you know, humans and dogs have always had this kind of bond that makes them, you know, almost elevated in terms of how we see them, maybe not as animals, maybe something between animals and personhood.
00:47:32
Speaker
It's a lot to talk about, I guess. Definitely. I think the bond got a lot closer as time went on. Basically, it seems like every, I don't know, six months, there's a new new research out making the domestication point of dogs even older than we thought. We'll put this in the show notes as well. Kind of more recent, again, this year, research that came out in National Geographic about
00:48:01
Speaker
14,000 year old canine that shows that prehistoric people may have cared for a sick puppy, so that kind of idea of emotional attachment equals bonding and things like that. I think it's always been a case that humans have always loved cute fluffy things. Yeah, you know.
00:48:20
Speaker
I think I remember a site, it was a prehistoric site in North America. Now I can't quite remember where it was, but they found sort of a wild felid, I forget which species, sort of associated with a settlement. And it sort of shows it died quite young, but it did show that someone took it in and probably looked after it. And now they're proclaiming a child, I can't quite recall why they made that argument.
00:48:47
Speaker
There's just, yes, see cute links, take it home. I mean, I don't blame them. That's probably why a lot of how a lot of domestication started. Oh, they look cute. It's the truly the ubiquitous thing of throughout time is it looks cute. So, you know, kind of pick it up.
00:49:08
Speaker
really like we've changed so much and also not an awful lot at the same time. Yeah, I mean, it's just it's funny, like how much that kind of bond really
00:49:21
Speaker
ends up in our interpretations of archaeological research. I think this was from an academic paper I read a while ago, but there was this whole thing about dog burials and how dog burials in Siberia, I think it was. They were buried closer in form to, let's say, human burial rather than how animal remains were normally discarded.
00:49:46
Speaker
Then of course one difficult thing that you need to do when interpreting, especially sort of dog remains or species that
00:49:54
Speaker
are closer to us, or at least in the West. It's like taking away the bias, not interpret the relationship between past people and said species the same way as we would now. Because even though dogs were very important, members of the community back in antiquity say in Britain, people also did not shy away from eating them if they needed to.
00:50:17
Speaker
And that's actually a really good point to bring up is, you know, the kind of bias. I mean, this goes for zoo archaeology and archaeology in general, but, you know, there is this kind of...
00:50:28
Speaker
thing we need to always keep in mind, which is that the perceptions between, like, modern day perceptions versus, let's say, prehistoric perceptions are going to be different. So there might be a shared kind of perception of dogs being, you know, man's best friend, as people like to say. But like you said, you know, people would eat dogs. It comes to a point where, you know, if you gotta eat, you gotta eat.
00:50:52
Speaker
I mean, yeah, exactly. I mean, and it is an important bias to kind of confront. Because it's something I find that people struggle to accept sometimes. And they thought like, Oh, no, we couldn't have fossil eaten dog. No, yes, we did. No, exactly. An amount. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's it. And maybe it's because I've been doing archaeology for a fair amount of time and been exposed to kind of what I would necessarily not
00:51:18
Speaker
I don't want to say taboo, but not necessarily something I would think of doing as someone with modern sensibilities. But you know, it's getting over that kind of like, you know, shock.
00:51:29
Speaker
not really shocked because that makes it seems, I don't know, it seems a bit out of line. It's not like in a way like you've got to like erase sort of your cultural bias when you look at the archaeological record because just because I don't know, say you're British and you're working on a British site from 2000 years ago, people might have thought like in a radically different way from you. Yeah, exactly.
00:51:51
Speaker
Actually, no, just cut that whole thought out because I don't even know what I'm getting at. No, I think it totally makes total sense. And I think dogs are a really good way to talk about this, because I think it's a general concept in archaeology, whether you're dealing with, you know, how people dealt with human remains versus how, you know, people saw different animals. It's completely different in a lot of cases.
00:52:16
Speaker
I think like a big one as well that people usually struggle to come to terms with is ritual cannibalism. Yeah that's the one I was actually thinking of and to be fair like people eating dog is kind of similar in that you know you elevate this animal to what I would say is about the same level as a person you would love a dog as much as you love a person so the idea of eating a dog is kind of
00:52:40
Speaker
you know, a little out there for you. But because I guess depending on the culture you're from, you almost have like different classes of animals. So you've got your class A, which are the ones I considered pets, that you'd find taboo and you're just like would not be able to accept the facts like would never eat them. And others are sort of fine to eat. Yeah. And even say within Western Europe, you see
00:53:05
Speaker
differences in what animals are eaten and what aren't. So example, I think here in Britain, there was a big scandal a few years back, because I think they found out that it was a horse, right? Burgers, it was horse. And people were outraged because people really love a horse in this country. Because like equestrianism is a lot more developed here. A lot of people keep horses. Now where I'm from, horse meat is a delicacy. A fair amount of money. Yeah.
00:53:32
Speaker
So if that happened back home, people have gone, oh, yay, calls for cheaper. It's just, you know, it's just differences in culture. And I mean, realistically, if we were all more accepting, we wouldn't be in the hellscape that we live in now. Anyway, I think that about does it for this episode. What a strangely political way to end off. But hey, you know, it's what we're here for. We're sorry. I'm not.
00:54:00
Speaker
Go eat a dog if you want. I'm okay with it. But yeah, so- Don't say that in front of Sandy. Oh, sorry. I love you, Sandy. You're up on the letter now.
00:54:13
Speaker
But yeah, I guess that'll do us for this episode of Archaeo Animals. As always, you can find us on Twitter at Archaeo Animals. You can find us on Facebook. We have a page for our podcast there as well. Send us any questions you have. We will eventually get to them at some point in the future whenever. At some point, we will. I promise.
00:54:34
Speaker
Um, but, uh, in any case, we will see you next episode, so... Yeah, thanks for listening, and Sandy's waving her paw. Um, I'm stogging. I don't know.
00:54:57
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 rqanimals. 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 RQLJ podcast network. Thanks for listening.
00:55:23
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