A review of published sources for age at death in cattle

Abstract

A survey of the literature for information relevant to estimating age at death in cattle has added detailed data on the age at which particular stages of dental development have been observed, based on sources where direct observations were certainly made. The information is of general interest for archaeozoology and, moreover, has enabled refinements to be made to existing methods for ageing cattle dentition using tooth eruption and wear (Jones and Sadler 2012). The survey presents summaries of published work on longevity in cattle, and on variation in eruption and wear.

Keywords:

• cattle
• age at death
• mortality profiles
• herd structure
• longevity

The authors are grateful to many people for help with this work, and these are shown in the methods and reference material paper (Jones and Sadler 2012).