Between the 5th and 14th centuries CE, communities in the Eastern Baltic region were transformed from loosely affiliated pagan tribes realigning themselves in a post-Roman world to consolidated Christian states. Throughout this period, one of the most ostentatious and well-known cultural practices was the public sacrifice of horses at cemetery sites. Archaeologists have intensively studied these horse deposits but paid little attention to ritual uses of other animal species. The “Baltic Paganism, Osteology and New Evidence from Zooarchaeology” (BONEZ) project researched how Eastern Baltic communities came together for communal ritual practice and how the allocation of resources for these types of rituals may have changed over time, especially during times of increased stress and interactions with neighboring Christian communities.
Our research combines established and vanguard techniques operating at the macroscopic, microscopic, and molecular level to reconstruct where, how, why, and with whom animals were deposited. These data show how public rituals changed over time as the performing communities themselves evolved. The project includes data from sites in northeastern Poland, the Kaliningrad region of Russia, and Central Lithuania ranging from the Roman to the Early Medieval periods.
The BONEZ project sampled horse teeth and/or recorded faunal assemblages from nine sites (Figure 1). Horse remains were recorded then sampled for strontium isotope and genetic analysis. The aDNA work was completed by project partners at the National Research Institute of Animal Production, Balice, Poland. Other species were recorded and some sampled for ZooMS analysis conducted as part of the project secondment at the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Science, University of Cambridge. Finally, Dr. French identified a feline ulna from the Roman period site of Paprotki to send to project partners at the University of Warsaw for aDNA and radiocarbon dating. This specimen is likely one of the oldest domesticated cat remains in Poland (pending C14 dating results).
The projects main objectives are:
1. Understanding the life histories, place of origin and the sex of sacrificed horses and whether these ritual choices were stable or changing over time.
2. Understanding what other animals were used in funerary and non-funerary rituals that occurred in cemeteries. Were these ritual choices were stable or changing over time.
3. Understanding how different types and scales of osteological methods, from the macroscopic to biomolecular, can be integrated to produce a more holistic of an archaeological deposit – whether that is a sacrificial deposit, burial, or rubbish pit.
