Data copyright © Dale Serjeantson unless otherwise stated
This work is licensed under the ADS Terms of Use and Access.
Dale
Serjeantson
Research Fellow
Archaeology
University of Southampton
Avenue Campus
Highfield
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
England
© Judith Dobie (English Heritage)
This project is a review of the animal bone evidence from Neolithic and Early Bronze Age sites in southern England. A Regional Review report, for which this database serves as an online appendix, has been written which synthesises the faunal assemblages and discusses their implications for husbandry, hunting, meat consumption and ritual activities. The synthesis is based on 205 assemblages from 117 sites of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age and on a list of 164 'placed' and possible placed deposits.
The counties covered are Berkshire, Cornwall, East Sussex, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Kent, the former county of Middlesex (now part of greater London), Oxfordshire, Somerset, Surrey, West Sussex, and Wiltshire.
The basic unit of the review and database is the animal bone assemblage, published or available in the grey literature. Some sites have more than one assemblage. All assemblages were included in which the number of identified specimens (NISP) was given. Additional bone deposits were included which were thought by the excavator or bone analyst to have been deliberately deposited and were also included in a data table with placed and possible placed deposits.
The dataset consists of CSV tables which give numbers of identified mammals, bird and fish, micro-mammals from selected sites, eruption and wear of teeth of cattle and pigs from selected sites, and details of placed and possibly placed deposits.
Summary tables are available of numbers of assemblages by period, assemblages by county, wild mammals by period, assemblages with wild mammals by period, placed deposit by deposit type and placed deposits by species.