ZooRoMed

Supplying ancient empires and medieval economies: Changes in animal husbandry between the Late Roman period and the Early Middle Ages in the Rhine Valley

I have the inmense pleasure to announce that I have been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (MSCA-IF), in the framework of Horizon 2020, funded by the European Commision. For two years, starting in September 2018, I will be working on the "ZooRoMed" project at the Integrative Prähistorische und Naturwissenschaftliche Archäologie (IPNA) (that is, Institute of Prehistory and Archaeological Science - IPAS) at the University of Basel, in Switzerland. The project will be supervised by PD Dr Sabine Deschler-Erb and Dr Claudia Gerling, and will be carried out in collaboration with Dr Elisabeth Marti-Grädel, the Römisch-Germanisch Museum in Cologne, and the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Cologne.

This project will investigate changes in animal husbandry between the Late Roman period and the Early Middle Ages, by comparing two different regions of the Rhine Valley: Basel Region (Switzerland) and North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany). The two geographical areas chosen for the project were frontier regions of the Roman Empire and were later located at the core of the Carolingian Empire. Research in different European regions during this period suggests that changes in the orientation and scale of husbandry practices reflect different socio-political conditions and economic strategies. Roman husbandry practices are known to have impacted considerably on the way domestic animals were raised in the various provinces of the Empire, in relation to a high degree of specialization of economic activities. The decline of the Roman political and economic structures and the development of feudal socio-economic structures had important consequences in animal husbandry practices, mainly in relation to the end of market-oriented production, and they include a self-subsistence economy, limited livestock mobility, no genetic improvement of livestock, and changes in management practices. The project will look for the reasons, timings and regional variations in the response (resilience or adaptation) of animal husbandry practices to the socio-political changes, including the progressive diversification of the production, the decrease of livestock size, the generalization of extensive or free range feeding regimes, and the limited mobility of livestock. For this, the project will undertake a thorough investigation of livestock body size and shape; integrate the zooarchaeological data with stable isotope analysis to investigate changes in the ways livestock was managed; and strive to understand the chronological and regional variability of the consequences of the collapse of the Roman Empire and of the gradual process that led to the birth of medieval economies.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 793221.

Outcomes

Publications:

Grau-Sologestoa, I., Deschler-Erb, S. & Gerling, C. 2024. Livestock management during times of transition. Exploring the relationship between animal size and diet from Roman to early medieval Augusta Raurica (Switzerland). Archaeol Anthropol Sci 16, 77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-024-01973-y
Granado, J., Wright, E., Blatter, R., Lange, J., Turgay, M., Bañuelos, L., Deschler-Erb, S., Stopp, B., Marti-Grädel, E., Schäfer, M., Grau-Sologestoa, I., Ammann, S., Schmid, D., Furger, A.R., Marti, R., Schibler, J., Schlumbaum, A. 2023. The mtDNA D-Loop Legacy of Cattle: Fluctuations in Diversity from the Neolithic to Early Medieval Times in Switzerland. Diversity 15, 687. https://doi.org/10.3390/d15050687
Grau-Sologestoa, I. Pümpin, C., Röpke, A., Exaltus, R., Deschler-Erb, E., Rentzel, P., Deschler-Erb, S. 2023. Animals, Crops and Dark Earth: An Interdisciplinary Study of Urban Development from the Late Roman Period to the Early Middle Ages in Cologne (Germany). Environmental Archaeology.
Grau-Sologestoa, I., Groot, M., Deschler-Erb, S. (2022) Innovation and Intensification: The use of cattle in the Roman Rhine Region. Environmental Archaeology.
Grau-Sologestoa, I., Ginella, F., Marti-Grädel, E., Stopp, B., Deschler-Erb, S. 2021. Animal husbandry between Roman times and the High Middle Ages in central Europe: a biometrical analysis of cattle, sheep and pig. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 13: 176.

Conference presentations:

Invited lecture “The zooarchaeology of animal husbandry during the transition between the Late Roman times and the Early Middle Ages” to the Archäeologisches Kolloquium at the AI Koln, on June 8th 2021.
Invited lecture to the Sheffield ZAP Seminar series on March 2021.
“Crossing the limes – Animals and economy on both sides of the Germanic frontier”, with Sabine Deschler-Erb, at the meeting of the Roman Period ICAZ. Working Group, on March 2021.
“Animal use in Late Roman Augusta Raurica” at the annual ARS meeting which took place online in November 2020. The presentation was recorded in a video and was made available to the ARS members in https://drive.infomaniak.com/app/share/144444/69a90fc4-1d51-487d-85cb-599f1b9ccd7d.
"Animal husbandry in times of change: the zooarchaeology of Cologne (Germany) during the Early Middle Ages” at the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, virtual, August 2020.
“Animal husbandry between the Late Roman period and the Early Middle Ages in the Rhine Valley: integrating zooarchaeology and stable isotope analysis”, ARS (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für die provinzialrömische Forschung in der Schweiz) Meeting, Geneva, November 2019.
“The archaeology of animal husbandry in transitions: from Roman to Medieval and from Medieval to Modern” at the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, Bern, September 2019.

Organised meetings and conferences:

Session “The rural economy in transition: agriculture and animal husbandry between the Late Roman times and the Early Middle Ages” at the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, virtual, August 2020.
Session “Transitions in agriculture: Integrating Archaeological Sciences” at the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, Bern, September 2019.

Datasets:

Grau-Sologestoa, Idoia, Ginella, Francesca, Marti-Grädel, Elisabeth, Stopp, Barbara, & Deschler-Erb, Sabine (2021) A biometrical database of cattle, sheep and pig from Roman and medieval Switzerland and adjacent areas of France [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4707131
Grau-Sologestoa, Idoia, & Deschler-Erb, Sabine (2021) Zooarchaeological database of early medieval Heumarkt (Cologne, Germany) [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4775388
Grau-Sologestoa, Idoia, & Deschler-Erb, Sabine. (2021). Zooarchaeological database of Late Roman Implenia Mühlegasse (Kaiseraugst, Switzerland) [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4707459

In preparation:

Edition of special issue of Environmental Archaeology: "The rural economy in transition: agriculture and animal husbandry between the Late Roman times and the Early Middle Ages", with M. Rizzetto and T. Davies.
Paper: "Cattle and pig management in Roman and early medieval Augusta Raurica (Switzerland): integrating carbon and nitrogen isotopes of bone collagen with zooarchaeological evidence", with S. Deschler-Erb and C. Gerling.

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