Fallow Deer In Iron Age And Roman Britain: A Study Of Fallow Deer Antlers Using Stable Isotopes
Creators: name: Osborne, David A.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2017
Subjects: Fallow deer
Iron Age
Roman
Great Britain
United Kingdom
antler
stable isotope
archaeology

description: As a species, the European fallow deer (Dama dama dama L.) is notable for the role played by humans in its reintroduction to Europe from an Anatolian refugium after the last glaciation (Davis and MacKinnon 2009; Masseti et al. 2006; Sykes et al. 2013; Yannouli and Trantalidou 1999).
A variety of opinions has been expressed as to the timing of the reintroduction of the species to Britain. Until recently, it was widely held that the animals were a medieval introduction, brought to this country by the Normans (Chapman and Chapman 1975; 1980; Langbein and Chapman 2003). However, there is evidence of fallow remains from several Roman sites (Chapman and Chapman 1975; Grant 1981, 47), suggesting that they may have been reintroduced during this period and this has been confirmed by recent work on remains from two sites in southern England: Fishbourne Roman Palace, Sussex, and Monkton, Kent (Sykes et al. 2011).
There is also the possibility that some skeletal elements were imported to Britain during the Iron Age, either as haunches of venison (Dobney and Harwood 1999, 382), or perhaps for medicinal uses (Sykes et al. 2011, 159).
To explore the place of early fallow deer in Britain, this study has the following aims
   •     to identify British sites from the Iron Age and Roman periods where Dama remains have been recovered, by means of a review of the literature and a search of archives of archaeological material;
	•	to obtain samples from them, where possible, for stable isotope analysis, to assess whether they are from imported or indige- nous animals; 
	•	to establish a framework of analysis of modern Dama antlers, because our understanding of stable isotope variations within antlers is poor, and to determine whether the results can shed light on dietary changes in the animals which produced them. 
By combining these approaches and setting the analysis of the archaeological material within a framework of analysis of modern fallow deer antlers, it is hoped to reach a new understanding of the archaeological specimens.
This study has the following objectives
	•	to obtain stable isotope values for carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) from sequential samples taken from modern Dama antlers; 
	•	to assess whether these values show any pattern from which dietary changes can be inferred; 
	•	to obtain samples from archaeological Dama antler specimens and apply the same analysis; 
	•	to determine whether the modern study can be used to inform the analytical results from the archaeological samples.

Stable isotope analysis was chosen as it is a well-known technique for exploring the relationships between an animal's diet and its environment. Nutrients in food consumed by an animal are incorporated into its developing tissues, along with their particular isotopic compositions (Hobson 1999; Kohn 1999). For herbivores such as deer, these reflect the environment in which dietary plants grow, as well as the method by which the plants photosynthsised chlorophyll. An animal's trophic level, or position in the foodweb, is also reflected in its isotope values. Some isotopic values are influenced directly from environmental factors, such as type of bedrock and soil, temperature and rainfall. Taken together, these environmental influences allow the results of stable isotope analysis of organic samples such as skeletal elements found in archaeological contexts to be related to the type of food consumed by the animal which produced them. 
Antlers have a unique property as faunal remains in that they are annually-regenerated tissue. This is significant in archaeological contexts in that the finding of antler does not indicate the presence, or death, of the animal which produced it, so may be found without any accompanying bones. Antler as a raw material was useful for manufacture of tools and ornaments (Greep 1994), as well as for consumption in medicine (Reitz and Wing 2008, 6), so would have been traded and the characteristic, palmate shape of the fallow antler and the species' rarity could have made it a more desirable, exotic commodity. Traded antlers which originated outside Britain may have come from animals whose diet included plants with a different isotopic content to indigenous plants, so stable isotope analysis may be able to detect these differences in the isotopic 'signature' of the antlers. This record was migrated from the OpenDepot repository service in June, 2017 before shutting down.