ZooRoMed · Supplying ancient empires and medieval economies: Changes in animal husbandry between the Late Roman period and the Early Middle Ages in the Rhine Valley

Supplying ancient empires and medieval economies: Changes in animal husbandry between the Late Roman period and the Early Middle Ages in the Rhine Valley

This project has investigated changes in animal husbandry between the Late Roman period and the Early Middle Ages, by comparing two different regions of the Rhine Valley: Basel Region (Switzerland) and North Rhine Westphalia (Germany). These areas were frontier regions of the Roman Empire and were later located at the core of the Carolingian Empire, making them the ideal case-studies to understand the consequences that socio-political upheavals during this transitional period had on animal husbandry practices, and the efficiency of low-input, small scale subsistence practices. Roman husbandry practices are known to have impacted considerably on the way domestic animals were raised in the various provinces of the Empire, in relation to a high degree of specialization of economic activities. The decline of the Roman political and economic structures and the development of feudal socio-economic structures had important consequences in animal husbandry practices, mainly in relation to the end of market-oriented production, and they include a self-subsistence economy, limited livestock mobility, no genetic improvement of livestock, and changes in management practices. The project looked at the reasons, timings, and regional variations in the response of animal husbandry practices to the socio-political changes, including the progressive diversification of the production, the decrease of livestock size, the generalization of free range feeding regimes, and the limited mobility of livestock. The project has undertaken a thorough investigation of livestock (cattle, sheep and pig) body size and shape; integrated the zooarchaeological data with stable isotope analysis; and strived to understand the chronological and regional variability of the consequences of the collapse of the Roman Empire and of the gradual process that led to the birth of medieval economies. The results of this project show that livestock improvement continued well into the Late Roman times, despite this being a period of instability and profound changes in settlement patterns, accompanied by movements of different populations. The size of domesticates decreased only after the 6th c., and continued to do so at least until the later High Middle Ages. The size decrease affected mainly cattle, and affected less pig, which turned into the most common species in the study regions. The reasons behind the size decrease are due to a genetic change (due to a bottleneck created by the end of livestock markets), less control over feeding and breeding, and different herd sex ratios. These were an adaptation of animal husbandry to broader socio-economic transformations, in the context of a turn to a more self-sufficient, smaller scale and mixed types of agriculture.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз