The role of cattle at Prehistoric lake-dwelling sites in Switzerland: an investigation of husbandry practices and the spread of cultural influence.

Project Information

LAKEBOS

Grant agreement ID: 792076

DOI

10.3030/792076

Project closed

EC signature date 21 March 2018

Start date 15 September 2018

End date 31 December 2020

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 175 419,60

EU contribution

€ 175 419,60

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT BASEL
Switzerland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LAKEBOS (The role of cattle at Prehistoric lake-dwelling sites in Switzerland: an investigation of husbandry practices and the spread of cultural influence.)

Reporting period: 2018-09-15 to 2020-09-14

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The spread of livestock animals and farming practices through Europe during the Neolithic period is thought to have involved two dispersal routes: 1. along the Danube corridor and through central Europe, and 2. around the Mediterranean littoral, resulting in a continental route focused on cattle husbandry and a caprine focused coastal route. These broad husbandry patterns became embedded in these regions, resulting in the establishment of cattle-based cultures in central Europe and caprine based cultures in the Mediterranean region, a pattern which continued into the Bronze Age and beyond. Switzerland, with its long heritage of cattle husbandry, is located between the paths of these two routes, and is an area where their influences met and interacted, it is also home to large well preserved and precisely dated assemblages of cattle remains, recovered from wetland contexts, which provide a rare opportunity to study early European animal husbandry in unprecedented temporal detail.

LAKEBOS will use prehistoric Swiss cattle remains as a proxy to answer the question: How did agricultural innovation spread through the area now occupied by modern Switzerland during the Neolithic and Bronze Age? It will do this using zooarchaeological and archaeogenetic techniques.

Cattle are some of the most important livestock animals for food production in Europe, and it is vital to understand more about the history of our relationship with this animal for future agricultural planning. The project will investigate the flexibility of prehistoric people to adapt their livestock husbandry to changing and varied environments, and this knowledge will provide an important historical perspective to the present day activity of farmers.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The research was divided into two areas: archaeozoology and archaeogenetics.

Archaeozoology
This project has collated and analysed all archaeozoological cattle data from Neolithic and Bronze Age Switzerland on both a temporal and regional scale.
The fine-scale dating possible at many of the lake-side settlements through dendrochronology has allowed for these data to be analysed using very fine 100-year timeslices. Results show that changes in cattle frequency and size are correlated through time across Switzerland between c4000 and 2500 cal BC, with higher frequencies of cattle linked to larger body size, and that cattle husbandry changed broadly in line with perceived cultural changes in both the east and west. Of particular interest is a clear increase in both cattle frequencies and body size around the time of the introduction of the Corded Ware Culture (CWC), contrary to a pattern of body size decrease seen across Europe at this time. The most likely explanation for the increase in size is the introduction of a new population (or populations) of larger cattle into the region, providing perhaps some of the earliest evidence for cattle “improvement” in Europe.

A regional analysis compared Alpine versus lowland, and settlements on different lakes. This indicated that cattle from the Alpine valleys of the Rhine and Rhone had a larger body on average than those from the lowlands. Cattle from settlements on Lake Biel were also on average larger than those on lake Neuchatel. It's also clear that cattle at lake Constance are larger than on the western lakes or even at lake Zurich, and that cattle at lake Zurich become larger than those on lake Biel.

Archaeogenetics
Ancient DNA from two Swiss Neolithic settlements was extracted and sequenced. The sample from the site of Twann (lake Biel) has yielded just T3 cattle, but the sample from Versicherung (lake Zurich) has yielded T3, T2 and a possible Q. This variation found in a small sample indicates that diversity was high in Neolithic Swiss cattle and raises questions around areas of origin as both T2 and Q haplotypes are linked to the Near East.

Publications
Wright, E. 2021. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 13, 36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01252-6
Wright, E., et al 2021. Neolithic and Bronze Age cattle data from Switzerland. Open Context. https://doi.org/10.6078/M7H13049.

Conferences
August 2020. European Association of Archaeology (EAA), Virtual Conference. Cattle husbandry in Middle and Late Neolithic Switzerland: tracing agricultural production just north of the Alps
November 2019. Association of Environmental Archaeology (AEA), Sheffield, UK. Exploring the diversity of cattle husbandry in Neolithic Switzerland: Environmental impact or cultural influence?
September 2019. European Association of Archaeology (EAA), Bern, Switzerland. The LAKEBOS project: Transitions in prehistoric cattle husbandry in Switzerland
March 2019. Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 15,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes VI Kiel, Germany. The aurochs in Prehistoric Switzerland: humans and wild cattle in a diversity of landscapes

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

"This is the first time that cattle frequency and biometrical data from Neolithic and Bronze Age Switzerland have been collated and analysed together across both time and space. The use of 100 year timeslices is rarely possible in zooarchaeology and this work sets a baseline for the future. This approach identified possibly the earliest evidence for cattle ""improvement"" in Europe, and the different timing of this innovation in eastern and western Switzerland.

This was also the first time that Ancient cattle DNA from Swiss Neolithic settlements was extracted and sequenced. The diversity found within this relatively small sample raises new questions around origins, and indicates that this is an important area for future genetic research.

This is also the first time that a large quantity of Swiss zooarchaeological data from multiple sites has been published online in an open access repository.

Impact
Within academic archaeology the results are highly important for our study of the introduction of early agricultural innovations. Future work will build on this by investigating in more depth what were the most likely areas of origin for the introduction of larger cattle stock at the end of the Neolithic period and investigating why this process happened. It also introduces a clearer animal element to the cultural changes and introductions that were happening across Central Europe during the late Neolithic.
An edited book that the fellow has been managing during the project (Humans and Cattle: Interdisciplinary perspectives on an ancient relationship, Lockwood Press, 2021), will include 20 papers addressing cattle-human interactions in the past. This book will be accessible to academics working in human-animal studies as well as the general public.

The public will also be able learn about the project outcomes through museum displays (such as at the National Museum of Switzerland). The fellow hopes also to have inspired future archaeologists through the school sessions that she was involved with in her host department.

More widely the results enhance our understanding of the way that humans managed their livestock in the past, through large cultural and environmental changes. With the increasing impact of modern climate change and the large social and economic changes brought about by the global pandemic, it is more important than ever to learn about strategies adopted in the past."

Swiss Cattle - the focus of the LAKEBOS project