CatCoW
Cattle husbandry and dairying at the introduction of the Corded Ware Culture: Agricultural and dietary change during the 3rd Millenium BC
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This project will consider the hypothesis that the arrival of Corded Ware in Central and Northern Europe led to the introduction of new cattle stock and an increasing economic reliance on dairy products.
The introduction of the Corded Ware Culture across much of Central and Northern Europe during the 3rd millennium BC was a time of major cultural transformation, which recent ancient genomic work has linked to a series of migrations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe region. The people attributed to the Corded Ware Culture had shared burial practices, material culture and cord-decorated ceramics.
It has been suggested people attributed to the Corded Ware Culture had an increased reliance on dairy products compared to other Neolithic populations. However, the context of this potential dietary change has not been explored, and we currently do not know enough about how animal husbandry practices or agriculture may have changed at this time, or how dairy products were being used on a daily basis.
CatCoW will investigate this issue by focusing on animal bone and pottery recovered from settlements in the areas now occupied by modern day Switzerland and the Netherlands, which both have rich archaeological records covering the transition to the Corded Ware Culture.
Images
Title page: Two oxen pulling a cart – no copyright. CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Corded Ware pottery: Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Milk: Santeri Viinamäki (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glass_of_milk.jpg), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode
Cheese: Frank Schulenburg (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cowgirl_Creamery_Point_Reyes_-_Red_Hawk_cheese.jpg), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode
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