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Staff profile

Overview

Louisa Gidney

Biography

Research Topic
Cattle: From Conception to Consumption. An Archaeological and Historical Perspective from Britain. Cattle are the subject of this study as this species is somewhat neglected by current research at Durham in comparison to other domestic farm animals, particularly pigs, despite historical, literary and ethnographic sources suggesting that cattle were a symbol of wealth and of higher status than, for example, sheep or goats. Cattle were therefore of central importance to the economy of societies in the past, beyond the basics of the dairy and the yoke for live animals and meat and hides once culled. From an archaeological viewpoint, cattle have robust bones with good survival and less problem with recovery bias by hand excavation. Large assemblages of animal bones have been recovered from a variety of medieval sites, both urban and rural, including higher status sites, such as castles. Sufficient published data exist to look for regional and chronological trends both in the exploitation of live cattle and of carcase utilisation. Taking the medieval period as the focus for this study gives an opportunity for comparing historical documents, such as cookery texts and account rolls, with the contemporary archaeological information in a way that is not usually possible within the constraints of commercial archaeology. Rather than treating the herd as a single unit, this project examines the life cycle of the individual constituents of the herd and their relative importance to each other under systems of management designed for different outputs. Data from modern Dexter cattle, both live and reference skeletons, are used to interpret both management and culinary decisions in the past, which have resulted in the bones found in the archaeological record.