Dead or alive? Investigating long-distance transport of live fallow deer and their body parts in antiquity

Abstract

The extent to which breeding populations of fallow deer were established in Roman Europe has been obscured by the possibility that the skeletal remains of the species, in particular Dama foot bones and antlers, were traded over long distances as objects in their own right. This paper sets out to refine our understanding of the evidence for the transportation of living and dead fallow deer in Iron Age and Roman Europe. To achieve this, museum archives containing purportedly early examples of Dama antler were searched, with available specimens sampled for carbon, nitrogen and strontium isotope analyses, and compared with data for archaeological fallow deer from across Europe. Importantly, the resulting isotope values can be interpreted in light of new modern baseline data for fallow deer presented here. Together these multi-isotope results for modern and archaeological fallow deer provide a more critical perspective on the transportation of fallow deer and their body parts in antiquity.

Keywords:

• Roman Britain
• Fallow deer
• Dama dama
• Carbon isotopes
• Nitrogen isotopes
• Strontium isotopes

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of the Dama International Project, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Standard Grant No. AH/I026456/1). The authors are grateful to Rhiannon Stevens and Karis Baker for discussion of some of the data presented here, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also go to all of the zooarchaeological colleagues who provided information and samples for analyses on which this paper is based, in particular to Jim Morris, Lena Strid and Rebecca Nicholson whose samples were of particular importance to the research herein. The Phoenix Park fallow deer skeletal ‘Carden’ collection is held within the collections of the National Museum of Ireland – Natural History and is currently being catalogued and archived. RFC is grateful to Mr Nigel Monaghan, Keeper of Natural History, National Museum of Ireland for the use of the museum's research facilities.