Matteo Bormetti

My research primarily concerns the relationship between humans and other animals in the past. I have an interest in the archaeology of prehistoric and early historic Mediterranean, Northern Europe and the Arabian Peninsula. I have been working on the reconstruction of animal husbandry strategies, waste disposal practices, the exploitation of cetaceans species and ancient beekeeping

Thesis Abstract

The main aim of this PhD project is to evaluate to what extent the British Late Iron Age was ‘static’ or ‘dynamic’ in terms of its livestock type and management, and whether some of the husbandry innovations that we see in the Roman period had deeper roots in the Iron Age.

Zooarchaeological data will be interpreted with the intent to reconstruct the changes in the ways of life of late prehistoric farming communities, concentrating on the transition between Middle Iron Age and Late Iron Age in Central England.

This project will combine the study of faunal remains with that of their context of deposition: each site will be studied using a range of zooarchaeological analyses that includes livestock frequencies and ageing, spatial patterning of body parts, butchery, gnawing and burning marks within single sites and contexts, and the estimate of size and shape of the livestock through the analysis of bone measurements.

The key goals of this study are:

1. to reconstruct waste disposal practices and assess how they influence the composition of the assemblages and the reliability of other analyses
2. to investigate the diachronic change of animal husbandry and its relationship with social change; to define carcass processing and butchery in relation to economy
3. to detect landraces and livestock improvement by comparing variations in size and shape; to compare all the above-mentioned results geographically with Southern England and diachronically to the Romanisation period.