Alan Outram

• BA, MSc, PhD, MCIfA, FSA
• Professor at University of Exeter

Horse domestication revolutionized transport, communications, and warfare in prehistory, yet the identification of early domestication processes has been problematic. Here, we present three independent lines of evidence demonstrating domestication in the Eneolithic Botai Culture of Kazakhstan, dating to about 3500 B.C.E. Metrical analysis of horse...

Current research themes relating to prehistoric Central Asian pastoralism are discussed, and the Neolithic to Bronze archaeological sequence in Kazakhstan is briefly outlined. The results of new faunal analyses of six later Bronze Age sites in Central and Northern Kazakhstan are presented. These studies are based upon the analysis of 63,529 bone fr...

The paper argues that our current understanding of the animal bones from causewayed enclosure sites in Britain is flawed. During the 1980–90s, a number of key interpretations, still frequently espoused, were based more upon anecdote and theory-driven assertion than on empirical evidence. An example is that evidence of bone processing (butchery and...

Recent excavations at the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village, an Initial Middle Missouri site in Mitchell, South Dakota have revealed a large, clay-lined feature filled with fractured and fragmented bison bones. Fracture and fragmentation analysis, along with taphonomic evidence, suggests that the bones preserved within the feature represent evide...

Zooarchaeologists have often employed studies of bone fracture morphology as a means of understanding past human cultural activity, and various methodological approaches have been developed for analyzing archaeological broken bone assemblages. It is widely understood that bones degrade over time, however, few studies have attempted to define and qu...

Now extinct, the aurochs (Bos primigenius) was a keystone species in prehistoric Eurasian and North African ecosystems, and the progenitor of cattle (Bos taurus), domesticates that have provided people with food and labour for millennia¹. Here we analysed 38 ancient genomes and found 4 distinct population ancestries in the aurochs—European, Southwe...

This paper reports a high-resolution isotopic study of medieval horse mobility, revealing their origins and in-life mobility both regionally and internationally. The animals were found in an unusual horse cemetery site found within the City of Westminster, London, England. Enamel strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotope analysis of 15 individuals prov...

Western Eurasia witnessed several large-scale human migrations during the Holocene1–5. Here, to investigate the cross-continental effects of these migrations, we shotgun-sequenced 317 genomes—mainly from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods—from across northern and western Eurasia. These were imputed alongside published data to obtain diploid genot...

Recent genetic studies point towards 6 th millennium BC central Europe as the core region for the emergence of the lactase persistence (LP) gene mutation -13,910 * T, making it important to understand the intensity of milk production and consumption among Linearbandkeramik (or LBK) farming groups. However, it is not known if milking was part of the...

For over a decade there has been general, but not universal, consensus that the earliest known evidence for horse husbandry was at Eneolithic Botai, Kazakhstan, circa 3,500 BCE. Recent ancient genomic analyses, however, indicate that Botai is not the source of modern domestic horse stock (DOM2 lineage), but is instead related to the Przewalski clad...

The horse is central to many Indigenous cultures across the American Southwest and the Great Plains. However, when and how horses were first integrated into Indigenous lifeways remain contentious, with extant models derived largely from colonial records. We conducted an interdisciplinary study of an assemblage of historic archaeological horse remai...

Zooarchaeology is not only the study of animals in the past but also how humans have interacted with them in the broadest possible sense. The most fundamental and basic task of a zooarchaeological analyst is to identify faunal remains before interpreting their meanings. Within zooarchaeology, taphonomy is frequently understood more broadly than tha...

Direct and accurate radiocarbon dating of lipid residues preserved in ceramics is a recently established method that allows direct dating of specific food products and their inception in human subsistence strategies. The method targets individual fatty acids originating from animal fats such as ruminant dairy, ruminant adipose, non-ruminant adipose...

In European and many African, Middle Eastern and southern Asian populations, lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic trait to have evolved over the past 10,000 years1. Although the selection of LP and the consumption of prehistoric milk must be linked, considerable uncertainty remains concerning their spatiotemporal configu...

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day do...

This volume originates in a conference session that took place at the 2018 International Council of Archaeozoology conference in Ankara, Turkey, entitled "Humans and Cattle: Interdisciplinary Perspectives to an Ancient Relationship." The aim of the session was to bring together zooarchaeologists and their colleagues from various other research fiel...

Western Eurasia witnessed several large-scale human migrations during the Holocene. To investigate the cross-continental impacts we shotgun-sequenced 317 primarily Mesolithic and Neolithic genomes from across Northern and Western Eurasia. These were imputed alongside published data to obtain diploid genotypes from >1,600 ancient humans. Our analyse...

Megafauna paintings have accompanied the earliest archaeological contexts across the continents, revealing a fundamental inter-relationship between early humans and megafauna during the global human expansion as unfamiliar landscapes were humanized and identities built into new territories. However, the identification of extinct megafauna from rock...

Domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are the most variable-sized mammalian species on Earth, displaying a 40-fold size difference between breeds. Although dogs of variable size are found in the archeological record, the most dramatic shifts in body size are the result of selection over the last two centuries, as dog breeders selected and propagat...

The warhorse is arguably the most characteristic animal of the English Middle Ages. But while the development and military uses of warhorses have been intensively studied by historians, the archaeological evidence is too often dispersed, overlooked or undervalued. Instead, we argue that to fully understand the cultural significance and functional r...

During the Early Bronze Age, populations of the western Eurasian steppe expanded across an immense area of northern Eurasia. Combined archaeological and genetic evidence supports widespread Early Bronze Age population movements out of the Pontic–Caspian steppe that resulted in gene flow across vast distances, linking populations of Yamnaya pastoral...

Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare¹. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling2–4 at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 bc³. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestic...

Popular culture presents a deep‐rooted perception of medieval warhorses as massive and powerful mounts, but medieval textual and iconographic evidence remains highly debated. Furthermore, identifying warhorses in the zooarchaeological record is challenging due to both a paucity of horse remains relative to other domesticates, and the tendency of re...

Popular culture presents a deep-rooted perception of medieval warhorses as massive and powerful mounts, but medieval textual and iconographic evidence remains highly debated. Furthermore, identifying warhorses in the zooarchaeological record is challenging due to both a paucity of horse remains relative to other domesticates, and the tendency of re...

DNA hybridization‐capture techniques allow researchers to focus their sequencing efforts on preselected genomic regions. This feature is especially useful when analysing ancient DNA (aDNA) extracts, which are often dominated by exogenous environmental sources. Here, we assessed, for the first time, the performance of hyRAD as an inexpensive and des...

Physical evidence of weapon trauma in medieval burials is unusual, and evidence for trauma caused by arrowheads is exceptionally rare. Where high frequencies of traumatic injuries have been identified, this is mainly in contexts related to battles; it is much less common in normative burials. Osteological analysis of one context from an assemblage...

This paper presents new radiocarbon dates and the results of the first archaeobotanical investigations at Eneolithic Botai site, for the first time aiming to explore the plant food component in the diet of Botai population and if the inhabitants of the Botai were a part of an early crop food exchange network. Our excavation of a hut circle and asso...

Cambridge Core - Prehistory - Subsistence and Society in Prehistory - by Alan K. Outram

Geometric morphometric methods (GMM), which were developed to characterize the shape and size of biological organisms, have been applied within zooarchaeology over the past decade to address animal domestication processes and to refine morphological criteria to differentiate between taxa. However, there has been limited utilization of these methods...

Introducing the Warhorse Project and its research questions

Horse domestication revolutionized warfare and accelerated travel, trade, and the geographic expansion of languages. Here, we present the largest DNA time series for a non-human organism to date, including genome-scale data from 149 ancient animals and 129 ancient genomes (≥1-fold coverage), 87 of which are new. This extensive dataset allows us to...

The indigenous populations of inner Eurasia—a huge geographic region covering the central Eurasian steppe and the northern Eurasian taiga and tundra—harbour tremendous diversity in their genes, cultures and languages. In this study, we report novel genome-wide data for 763 individuals from Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Ta...

Easter and Christmas are the most important events in the Christian calendar. Despite their global reach and cultural significance, astonishingly little is known about the festivals’ genesis. Equally obscure is our understanding of the animals that have come to be associated with these celebrations – notably the Christmas Turkey and the Easter ‘Bun...

Important nutritional resources can be acquired by breaking bone shafts to access marrow, whereas heavy comminution and boiling of cancellous bone is required to extract bone grease. Since labour and fuel costs of these processes differ considerably, the relative intensities of these activities provide a possible proxy for nutritional stress or ele...

Ancient steppes for human equestrians The Eurasian steppes reach from the Ukraine in Europe to Mongolia and China. Over the past 5000 years, these flat grasslands were thought to be the route for the ebb and flow of migrant humans, their horses, and their languages. de Barros Damgaard et al. probed whole-genome sequences from the remains of 74 indi...

Revisiting the origins of modern horses The domestication of horses was very important in the history of humankind. However, the ancestry of modern horses and the location and timing of their emergence remain unclear. Gaunitz et al. generated 42 ancient-horse genomes. Their source samples included the Botai archaeological site in Central Asia, cons...

This paper presents a new method of assessing and displaying taphonomic history through detailed bone fracture analysis. Bone is a particularly useful indicator of taphonomic processes as it is sensitive to when it is broken based on degradation over time. Our proposed ‘fracture history profiles’ show the sequences of fracture and fragmentation tha...

The pressures on honeybee (Apis mellifera) populations, resulting from threats by modern pesticides, parasites, predators and diseases, have raised awareness of the economic importance and critical role this insect plays in agricultural societies across the globe. However, the association of humans with A. mellifera predates post-industrial-revolut...

The development of agriculture has often been described as the most important change in all of human history. Volume 2 of The Cambridge World History explores the origins and impact of agriculture and agricultural communities, and also discusses issues associated with pastoralism and hunter-fisher-gatherer economies. To capture the patterns of this...

Field archaeology is normally associated with outdoor excavation and exposure to the natural environment. Archaeological excavations have adapted to a wide spectrum of these conditions, but the recent prominence of archaeological sites as tourist attractions and educational facilities has occasionally led to dramatically different environments for...

The pressures on honeybee (Apis mellifera) populations, resulting from threats by modern pesticides, parasites, predators and diseases, have raised awareness of the economic importance and critical role this insect plays in agricultural societies across the globe. However, the association of humans with A. mellifera predates post-industrial-revolut...

This paper presents direct radiocarbon measurements on horse skeletal remains from the Beaker period settlement at the site of Newgrange in Ireland, finds which have previously been argued as the earliest domestic horses in Ireland. The new determinations date the horse remains to the Irish Iron Age and shed important new light on the introduction...

The relationship between bone mineral density and archaeological bone survivorship has played a critical role in zooarchaeological and taphonomic studies in recent decades. Numerous studies have suggested that higher-density skeletal element portions survive more frequently than lower-density element portions when archaeological assemblages are aff...

Archaeological experiments that use modern bones to replicate past animal bone assemblages have often failed to consider the effects of environment, storage and preparation on modern bones. Often, these experiments make little mention of the conditions to which bones were subject during their storage and preparation for use in experiments. In other...

Excavations at the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village (A.D. 1000–1150), an Initial Middle Missouri period Plains earthen lodge village site in eastern South Dakota, revealed new data regarding the lifeways and cultural systems of its prehistoric inhabitants. While extensive excavations had been conducted at the site and at a large number of other...

The authors examine the role of horses as expressed in assemblages from settlement sites and cemeteries between the Eneolithic and the Bronze Age in Kazakhstan. In this land, known for its rich association with horses, the skeletal evidence appears to indicate a fading of ritual interest. But that’s not the whole story, and once again micro-archaeo...

Bone marrow and bone grease processing at the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village (39DV2) has long been suspected but was only recently demonstrated scientifically. The current research details the analysis of fragmented bone assemblages from different points in the chronological sequence of the Mitchell site and establishes the presence of extensi...

Velim (Central Bohemia) is one of the most important sites of the Bronze Age of Central Europe. Although it has been known to archeologists for many years, it was only with the start of rescue excavations in 1984 that its wider significance became apparent, leading to a debate about its function and meaning. Opinion has been divided between those w...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © Oxbow Books, Rebecca Gowland, Christopher Knüsel and the individual authors, 2006 [FIRST PARAGRAPH] One of the most inimical ways to debase a people is to declare them cannibals - eaters of their own kind. The association between cannibalism and immorality, depravity, and base iniquity has co...

Fragmented, co-mingled assemblages of human and animal bones are not uncommon in archaeological deposits, particularly in prehistoric contexts. It is suggested, firstly, that standard approaches to studying the human material do not lend themselves to the complete understanding of such contexts, secondly, that the application of some techniques mor...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © Oxbow Books and the individual authors, 2005 The importance of bone fats as a resource is briefly discussed. The Middle Neolithic site of Ajvide, Gotland is described. The character of the bone assemblages from this site is discussed and the changes in subsistence economy on the island are ou...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © Oxbow Books and the Association for Environmental Archaeology 2004. Scattered and commingled human and animal remains are commonly encountered on archaeological sites, and this contextual relationship begs the question of whether human and animals were treated in a similar manner before buria...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2004 Prometheus Press/Palaeontological Network Foundation.This is the published version of an article published in the Journal of Taphonomy 2(3), pp.167-184 The history and development of skeletal part abundance studies is briefly discussed. Two principal strands of this sub-discipline are th...

The background to the Icelandic and Greenlandic sites under investigation is outlined and prior work on the Norse economies of the two islands is discussed. The importance of fat in the diet and the use of levels of bone marrow and grease exploitation as an indicator of subsistence stress are explained. The methodology for establishing levels of bo...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © Oxbow Books and the Association for Environmental Archaeology 2003. The background to the Icelandic and Greenlandic sites under investigation is outlined and prior work on the Norse economies of the two islands is discussed. The importance of fat in the diet and the use of levels of bone marr...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2002 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Past discussion on the unusual skeletal part representations at Klasies River Mouth is briefly summarized. Recent discussion in this journal, regarding the “Klasies Pattern”, has focused upon the differential destruction of small and large bovid bone epiphyses by carnivore ravaging and density-mediated attrition. Bartram & Marean (1999) argue, from...

The economic importance of bone fat to past peoples is discussed and the ethnography of bone marrow and grease extraction is briefly outlined. Models for expected patterns of bone fracture and fragmentation, relating to the exploitation of bone marrow and grease, are described. Current methods for assessing bone fracture and fragmentation, in archa...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Details of the original publication are available at http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/journals/journals/aa.html The importance of fat in the diet is outlined. The practice of rendering animal bones for their grease content is discussed. A methodology for identifying levels of bone fat exploitation, bas...

Three horses were butchered and their economic anatomy examined. A Meat Utility Index (MUI) and a Marrow Index (MI) were derived, and these were modified to produce a Food Utility Index (FUI) using the methodology of Binford (1978) and Metcalfe & Jones (1988). The indices were compared with those for caribou, and the economic anatomy of the two spe...

© World copyright - The Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology. Post-Medieval Archaeology is a biannual journal devoted to the study of the material evidence of European society wherever it is found in the world. Post-Medieval Archaeology is now published on behalf of the SPMA by Maney Publishing. Details of the original publication, Post-Medieval A...

The importance of fat in the diet is outlined. The practice of rendering anirnal bones for their grease content is discussed. A methodology for identifying levels of bone fat exploita- tion, based upon the analysis of bone fragmentation and bone fracture type, is described. Four Greenlandic sites are anaLyzed using these methods. Two of these, Sand...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © Oxbow Books and the individual authors, 2000 [FIRST PARAGRAPH] The interpretation of the Klasies River Mouth ungulate bone assemblage has been a major point of controversy for over a decade. Over this time, there have been attacks and counter-attacks passed between Lewis Binford and Richard K...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © Oxbow Books and the individual authors, 2004 The importance of fat in the diet is outlined and the importance of bones as a reliable source of fat is explained. Different patterns of bone marrow and grease exploitation are discussed with particular reference to marginal environments and how l...

© Individual authors, 2001 The importance of studying skeletal part abundance, with respect to economic anatomy, is outlined. The current methodology in this field is discussed. A new method for examining archaeological skeletal part abundance, with respect to bone transportation models, is described. This method scrutinises the difference between...

© the individual authors, 2006 [FIRST PARAGRAPH] Theodore White (1952, 1953) was amongst the first to realize that skeletal part frequencies might tell us much about past hunting and butchery strategies, and that presence or absence of particular elements might be related to particular economic decisions. It was Binford (1978), however, who first i...

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2004 The Society for Medieval Archaeology and authors.

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2005 SEA Hradec Králové and EXARC. Full details of the journal EuroREA are available at: http://www.eurorea.net/issues.html

BLDSC reference no.: DX210436. Thesis (doctoral)--University of Durham, 1998.