The study was conducted by zoo-archaeologists Umberto Albarella and Simon Davis at English Heritage's Ancient Monuments Laboratory. Similar but less conclusive evidence has been found in Newcastle and Oxford, and at Prudhoe Castle, Northumberland. The new material may have come from the Low Countries, he said, where techniques of intensive agriculture, drainage and pasture improvement were pioneered in the 15th and 16th centuries. Documentary evidence exists for the import of pied strains of cattle in the 17th century, but the trade may well have begun earlier. The bones, excavated between 1961- 1982 by Andrew Saunders, formerly Chief Inspector at English Heritage, represent food remains, and demonstrate Launceston Castle's decline in status after the medieval period.
Exotic foods disappear - such as kid, whale, dolphin, and a wide range of birds.
Between 1660-1840, the castle was used as a gaol and its grounds appear to have become the town's rubbish dump. It is currently undergoing conservation, supervised by the Humber Wetlands Project at the University of Hull, and will eventually go on display, with other boat remains from North Ferriby, in a new gallery at the Hull and East Riding Museum. According to Valerie Fenwick, Editor of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology , no other site in Europe compares to North Ferriby for either the quantity or the quality of its finds. He had been caught attempting to sell, at Christie's, a Bronze Age gold lunula and a 7th century AD penannular brooch stolen from the Limerick Museum in 1969. The prosecution followed an elaborate undercover surveillance operation conducted by the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, in co-operation with police forces in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.