Cattle management in an Iron Age/Roman settlement in the Netherlands: Archaeozoological and stable isotope analysis.

Cattle were the predominant domestic animal in the Iron Age and Roman Netherlands, yet their management is still incompletely understood. Some aspects of cattle management, such as birth season and the provision of fodder, have received little or no attention so far. This paper is the first to investigate these aspects for the Iron Age and Roman Netherlands, through a case study of the site of Houten-Castellum. The rural settlement of Houten-Castellum was inhabited from the Middle Iron Age to the Middle Roman period, allowing a comparison between the Iron Age and Roman period. Excavations at this site have yielded a large, well-preserved animal bone assemblage. This paper investigates cattle husbandry by using an integrated approach, combining a multi-isotope analysis (oxygen, carbon and strontium) with archaeozoological and archaeobotanical results from Houten-Castellum and comparing the results with archaeobotanical evidence for fodder and evidence for dairy use for the Iron Age and Roman Netherlands in general. While our data set is small and results must therefore be interpreted cautiously, there is convincing evidence for an extended birth season in the Middle Iron Age, as well as the use of fodder.

Ancient DNA, pig domestication, and the spread of the Neolithic into Europe.

The Neolithic Revolution began 11,000 years ago in the Near East and preceded a westward migration into Europe of distinctive cultural groups and their agricultural economies, including domesticated animals and plants. Despite decades of research, no consensus has emerged about the extent of admixture between the indigenous and exotic populations or the degree to which the appearance of specific components of the "Neolithic cultural package" in Europe reflects truly independent development. Here, through the use of mitochondrial DNA from 323 modern and 221 ancient pig specimens sampled across western Eurasia, we demonstrate that domestic pigs of Near Eastern ancestry were definitely introduced into Europe during the Neolithic (potentially along two separate routes), reaching the Paris Basin by at least the early 4th millennium B.C. Local European wild boar were also domesticated by this time, possibly as a direct consequence of the introduction of Near Eastern domestic pigs. Once domesticated, European pigs rapidly replaced the introduced domestic pigs of Near Eastern origin throughout Europe. Domestic pigs formed a key component of the Neolithic Revolution, and this detailed genetic record of their origins reveals a complex set of interactions and processes during the spread of early farmers into Europe.