Bioarchaeological research on animal dung – possibilities and limitations

Department of EnvironmentalSciences, IPAS - Intergrative Prehistory and Archaeological Science, Basel University, Spalenring 145, Basel,SwitzerlandAnimal dung is a potential source of information onvarious palaeoeconomical and palaeoecologicaltopics, which can often not be obtained throughother bioarchaeological find categories. Moreover,from the Neolithic onwards, dung preserved in archae-ological deposits is usually the result of the interactionof agricultural and animal husbandry activities and istherefore especially useful for the investigation of pastagro-pastoral economies. Thus, the recognition ofdung in archaeological, but also natural deposits,and its careful analysis deserves special attention.The importance of herbivore dung has long beenrecognised in modern bioarchaeological research.From the archaeobotanical point of view, one of thekey issues that has been addressed is the taphonomyof animal dung and the extent of its contribution toarchaeobotanical assemblages (see Miller and Smart1984; Neef and Bottema 1991). The first issue ofEnvironmental Archaeology was also dedicated to agreat extent to the topic as it dealt with fodder.Several of its papers focussed on the recognition andinterpretation of plant remains derived from dung,in relation to studies of fodder (Anderson andErtug-Yaras 1998; Charles 1998; Hall and Kenward1998; Karg 1998). After those first steps subsequentresearch focused on the animal dung itself, and pro-vided further insights of the potential of this materialfor solving diverse environmental archaeologicalresearch questions (e.g. Akeret et al. 1999; Carrionet al. 2000; Shahack-Gross et al. 2004; Leroy andSimms 2006). The accumulated experience andincreasing understanding of the taphonomy ofanimal dung in archaeological layers as well as therefining of methodologies led to increasing complexityandprecisionoftheoutcomeofenvironmentalarchae-ological studies on animal dung (e.g. Shahack-Gross2011; Baeten et al. 2012; Lancelotti and Madella2012; Portillo et al. 2012)The complex character of this find category has ledalso to a variety of approaches and research strategiesin relation to animal dung from archaeological depos-its. In order to establish more common methodologi-cal approaches among environmental archaeologistsworking on animal dung, the European researchnetwork ‘BIOARCH’, funded by the CNRS, initiateda workshop held at the Royal Belgian Institute ofNatural Sciences, in Brussels, June 2010. Thismeeting brought together various specialists: archaeo-botanists, archaeozoologists, micromorphologists,entomologists, biochemists, specialists in aDNA, etc.It focused on methodological aspects such as (1) theidentification of the animal species that producedarchaeological dung; (2) the varietyof bioarchaeologi-cal information that can be recovered from dung andmethods applied for its analysis, in particular, in aridenvironments and waterlogged deposits; (3) the inter-pretive value of archaeological dung remains with anemphasis on the variety of plant remains that can berecovered from it and questions related to animal hus-bandry; (4) experimental research helping to under-stand the contribution of dung to the generalbioarchaeological record in a better manner. Theresults of the papers and discussions of the workshopare collected in the contributions for this specialissue of Environmental Archaeology. They covervarious geographic regions, including both arid andwaterlogged preservation conditions, as well as