3 ms·
> how would you distinguish beloved pets from food animals? well, plausibly by quantity, or by the form of burial. perhaps the villa only had one or two lap dog
by civilitty 3y ago
> how would you distinguish beloved pets from food animals? well, plausibly by quantity, or by the form of burial. perhaps the villa only had one or two lap dogs?
The context of the burial is always important. The bones from cooked animals would most often end up in huge quantities in a midden rather than buried alone or with their owners. Any objects found with the remains like a collar or harness are also useful details.
The condition of the skeleton itself usually tells the story: pets are generally in the best shape. Beasts of burden have signs of repetitive stress while animals that were eaten most often have cut marks on their bones where tools were used to clean the carcass and prepare the meat. An animal like a dog might be prepared bone-in so the chemistry of the bones themselves can also indicate whether they were cooked or not.
- kragen 3y agoyeah, presumably the animal found wasn't cooked, but you don't eat livestock that died from illness unless you're starving
- KeplerBoy 3y agoRomans simply didn't eat dogs if there were other sources of food around. If they would have, chances are we still would do it today.
- kragen 3y agoit is true, as far as i know, that we have no records of the romans eating dogs but nothing about the romans is simple there are many foods the romans commonly ate (in rome, during at least some of its near-millennium of culinary change) that few or none of their modern descendants do. these include silphium, garum, liquamen, mallow leaves, marinated sow udders, peacock, flamingo, emmer, lamprey, lamprey semen, sea urchins, bitter vetch, dormice, azerole, open-arse, and raisin wine; most of these were considered delicacies, which is how we know about the romans eating them at all we do know that the romans did ritually sacrifice dogs in rome, and they claim that the oscans (another italic people) roasted dogs as part of a ritual sacrifice, so romans eating dogs, even in rome, seems plausible to me moreover, we're talking about an outlying province, 1400 km from the capital, with the potential for significantly different local customs — even if there were no oscans in the legions
- yellowapple 3y agoThanks to you I can now add "flamingo for Thanksgiving dinner" to my bucketlist.