Ding Dung: Animal Enclosures, Digested Bones and, Where was the Livestock in the Archaeological Site? Evidences from Experimentation and Zooarchaeology from Late Prehistory in the Western Mediterranean

Abstract

One of the most intriguing questions in many archaeological sites is to elucidate where the livestock was kept, and which and how many animals were herded. This is particularly compelling in Late Prehistory, when many sites were heavily fortified, and all the space intramuros seemed to be occupied by domestic buildings.

Some disciplines, such as micromorphology and palynology, help to answer some of these questions. In this paper, we will provide a perspective from zooarchaeology, which is one of the least explored disciplines to detect were the living animals were.

Together with a review of the archaeological and zooarchaeological literature for Late Prehistory in the Western Mediterranean, we will provide the results of a present-day experiment with pig dung. The objective of this experiment is to analyse whether the accumulation of digested bones could testify of the presence of pig enclosures, a hypothesis raised for the Iron Age levels of Althiburos (Tunisia; Portillo et al 2012).