Description

Summary: ox teeth and jaw fragments, from Bishops Cannings G76, Wiltshire.

Research results

Animal bone found during excavations of Beckhampton Road longbarrow by Paul Ashbee in 1964. During her reinvestigation of the osseous assemblage of the barrow, Banfield noted the presence of three domesticated cattle bone groups positioned along the length of the barrow on the pre-mound ground surface. These bones are part of bone group B4, which was positioned at the centre of the mound on a slightly built up ground surface. Not only does its treatment after death suggest it may have held some importance, but this individual appears to have been relatively old at the time of death, and had suffered and extremely serious head injury (potentially a botched attempt at slaughtering) several years before it finally died. She argues that these deposits were clearly deliberate, and demonstrate the importance of the community's relationships with domesticated cattle.

In her PhD with the university of Leicester, Bandfield (2018) re-examined the osseous assemblages Beckhampton Road, West Kennet and Cold Kitchen Hill long barrows, as well as material held by other institutions from a number of Neolithic long barrows in the Avebury and Salisbury plain areas. She takes a post-humanist approach to these materials, seeking to re-analyse and re-emphasise faunal assemblages which garnered little attention from the original excavators and in initial post-excavation analyses and publication. In doing so, she illustrates both the potential importance of human-animal relations to the communities who contructed these monuments, but also the significant meaning these remains may have conveyed.