Origins and Spread of Stock-Keeping in the Near East and Europe
These pages provide background information on the Origins and Spread of Stock-Keeping project, which is a multi-agency research project based at UCL and Durham University. The primary funding agency is the AHRC.
Overview
In western Eurasia we know that the earliest evidence for domestic farmyard animals occurs around 10,000 years ago. We also know that farming then spread westwards through Europe over the subsequent millennia, arriving in the far west and north of Europe some 6,000 years ago. For decades there have been major debates as to the nature of this spread, with many basic questions still remaining largely unanswered. The objective of this major research project, which has been funded for four years by the AHRC (start date: January 2007), is to address these questions. We are carrying out the largest and most systematic survey of published/archived archaeological animal bone data ever undertaken in order to re-examine the evidence for the origins of stock-keeping in the Near East and its spread into Europe during the Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic periods, c.12,000 to 6,000 years ago. The basis for our study is a comprehensive database of selected animal bone data from relevant sites. Analysis of these collated datesets will enable us to:
- establish the key characteristics of early Neolithic animal exploitation economies through time and over broad and geographic regions;
- understand the key factors that account for variation in early Neolithic animal exploitation (for example, are the differences due to the exploitation of locally available animals or to livestock imported from elsewhere?);
- explore possible variations in husbandry and hunting strategies that developed as Neolithic herding economies spread from their area/s of origin (for example, are there differences in husbandry practices through time and across both cultural and geographic boundaries and, if so, how can they be explained?);
- assess the speed of spread of livestock farming across Europe (for example, was it gradual or punctuated?);
- look for possible adaptive changes in husbandry and hunting practices;
- investigate the evidence for local indigenous domestication (for example, did indigenous domestication of widely distributed wild animals such as wild boar and cattle take place outside the core area of the Near East and, if so, was it spontaneous and devoid of external influence? And how much interaction was there between early farming groups and contemporary, adjacent foragers/hunters?);
- see whether the zooarchaeological evidence is similar to, or different from that already researched from ancient domestic and wild plant remains.
