Angela Trentacoste

British School at Rome

Animal management is shaped by its environmental and landscape context, but these factors are rarely investigated quantitatively in zooarchaeological studies. Here we aim to examine the relationship between trends in zooarchaeological data and environmental and climatic dynamics between the Middle Bronze Age and Late Antiquity in lowland northern I...

Log Size Indexes (LSI) allow the increase of the number of data and have been used in a number of zooarchaeological studies since 1950. However, some standards to calculate the log ratios remain unpublished, the calculation of the indexes can be tedious, and it is further hindered by the diversity of data recording practices. The R package ‘zoolog’...

PDF available online OPEN ACCESS: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14614103.2023.2282866

Presented are the results of the Falerii Novi Project, a multi-year international archaeological research project at the ancient urban site of Falerii Novi, in the Comune of Fabrica di Roma (Viterbo, Lazio), in the middle Tiber Valley. According to ancient sources, the Roman town of Falerii Novi was founded in the mid-third century BCE, when the ne...

Etruria contained one of the great early urban civilisations in the Italian peninsula during the first millennium BC, much studied from a cultural, humanities-based, perspective, but relatively little with scientific data, and rarely in combination. We have addressed the unusual location of twenty inhumations found in the sacred heart of the Etrusc...

Data available open access: https://doi.org/10.5287/bodleian:ORJB5yRq0 Trentacoste, A. 2024. Faunal Remains from the Late Antique to Ottoman Periods. In A.I. Wilson and B. Russell (eds), The ‘Place of Palms’: An Urban Park at Aphrodisias. Results of The Mica and Ahmet Ertegün South Agora Pool Project, p. 269–294 Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden.

During the fourth and third centuries BCE, Roman expansion into Italy reshaped the peninsula's Archaic societies and prompted new political relationships, new economic practices, and new sociocultural structures. Rural landscapes and urban spaces throughout Latium saw intensified use amidst novel principles of land management, animal husbandry, and...

This interdisciplinary edited volume presents twelve papers by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing the interconnected relationship between religion and the Roman economy over the period c. 500 bc to ad 350. The connection between Roman religion and the economy has largely been ignored in work on the Roman economy, but this volume explor...

A first synthesis of available data for the period of Rome’s expansion in Italy (about 400–29 b.c.e.) shows the role of climate and environment in early Roman imperialism. Although global indices suggest a warmer phase with relatively few short-term climate events occuring around the same time as the expansion, local data emphasize the highly varia...

This interdisciplinary edited volume presents twelve papers by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing the interconnected relationship between religion and the Roman economy over the period c. 500 BC to AD 350. The connection between Roman religion and the economy has largely been ignored in work on the Roman economy, but this volume explor...

(Forthcoming 2021/2022) Current environmental methods and survey of environmental analyses in Etruscan archaeology. Geomorphology, Palynology, Archaeobotany, Zooarchaeology

Little is known about the early history of the chicken ( Gallus gallus domesticus ), including the timing and circumstances of its introduction into new cultural environments. To evaluate its spatio-temporal spread across Eurasia and north-west Africa, the authors radiocarbon dated 23 chicken bones from presumed early contexts. Three-quarters retur...

Zooarchaeological data openly available at: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2b2dd337-8596-4339-aaa8-5fa16d849197

The University of Cincinnati, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio (Cagliari), undertook its first season of archaeological excavations and fieldwork at the Punic-Roman city of Tharros, Sardinia, in the summer of 2019. This report outlines the preliminary results of this first season of activities, while also...

Astonishingly little is known about the early history of the chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus). To better understand their spatiotemporal spread across Eurasia and Africa, we radiocarbon dated presumed early chicken bones. The results indicate chickens were an Iron Age arrival to Europe and that there was a consistent time-lag of several centuries...

There are strong interactions between an economic system and its ecological context. In this sense, livestock have been an integral part of human economies since the Neolithic, contributing significantly to the creation and maintenance of agricultural anthropized landscapes. For this reason, in the frame of the ERC-StG project ’ZooMWest’ we collect...

The rise of social complexity in the Mediterranean during late prehistory has been the object of many regional studies. The emergence of increasingly complex social hierarchies took place at different paces in different areas around the Mediterranean-e.g. in the Near East, Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Iberia, north Africa-but also different tempos...

Throughout the Western provinces of the Roman Empire, greater economic and political connectivity had a major impact on agricultural production, which grew in scale and specialisation after integration with the Roman state. However, uniquely in Western Europe, farming strategies in Italy began to evolve centuries before the Roman conquest, and many...

In central and northern Italy, the first millennium BC was characterised by the rise of urbanism and an expansion of nearly every area of production. Agriculture was no exception, and an increase in the scale and intensity of agricultural production sustained, and was sustained by, economic and population growth. Within this context, animal managem...

Plant-derived secondary metabolites consumed in the diet, especially polyphenolic compounds, are known to have a range of positive health effects. They are present in circulation after ingestion and absorption and can be sequestered into cells within particular organs, but have rarely been investigated systematically in osteological tissues. Howeve...

Domestication of wild cattle, sheep, and pigs began a process of body size diminution. In most of Western Europe this process continued across prehistory and was not reversed until the Roman period. However, in Italy, an increase in livestock body size occurred during the Iron Age, earlier than the Western provinces. In order to better understand t...

List of sites with data on chronology, analysis group, NISP, number of LSI values, and associated references. (DOCX)

Results of Mann-Whitney U tests on LSI values. (XLSX)

Results of chi-squared tests on livestock NISP. (XLSX)

Animal mobility is a common strategy to overcome scarcity of food and the related over-grazing of pastures. It is also essential to reduce the inbreeding rate of animal populations, which is known to have a negative impact on fertility and productivity. The present paper shows the geographic range of sheep provisioning in different phases of occupa...

Recovery and analysis of animal remains from proto-historic sites is now a routine part of Italian excavations. During the study of a faunal assemblage, it is not unusual to encounter a few human bones, typically small single elements from adult individuals. However, recent analyses of zooarchaeological assemblages from Forcello (Bagnolo San Vito)...

This report presents the recent results from the excavations of Cavità 254, a pyramidal hypogeum under the city of Orvieto. The report examines both the material culture as well as newly discovered archeo-zoological and archeo-botanical evidence.

Domestic livestock were a crucial part of Mediterranean communities throughout later prehistory. In the first millennium bc, livestock mangement changed, and was changed by, the rise of cities in Italy. Italian prehistory has a rich zooarchaeological tradition, but investigation of the Iron Age has been regionally divided and synthetic works on the...

Faunal remains recovered from the Etruscan site at Poggio Colla offer a new perspective on the use of animals in this rural sanctuary and suggest new ways of approaching the role of animals in Etruscan religious activity. Zooarchaeological analysis aims to contribute to the understanding of human–animal relationships on site through reconstruction...

In this paper an ethnoarchaeological analysis of pig husbandry in central-eastern Sardinia is presented. This research further develops a previous project with a similar focus undertaken in Corsica and northern Sardinia. Results presented here are based on ten interviews with local central-eastern Sardinian herders, and various other observations m...