All good points, Greg, though there is some British and other European
material from sites where wet-sieving to a sufficiently fine mesh (e.g.
2mm) has been undertaken to recover fish systematically, and that procedure
should have given good recovery of rats. The challenge is to quantify the
ubiquity of rats from deposits for which we know that the sampling and
retrieval would have recovered rats had they been present, and not simply
to use 'dot maps'.
As for broken pottery, I'm right with you there!
Terry O'Connor
On Apr 26 2007, Greg Campbell wrote:
> Fellow ZooArchers: in considering the archaeological evidence for black
> rats as a vector for disease (Black Death specifically), we all seem to
> be keeping our lips primly pursed about two serious issues:
>
> 1. retrieval methods usually employed in British (even European)
> historical archaeology (and even in later prehistory) would seldom
> recover remains of this animal, or others of similar size and rarity
>
> 2. this animal and others of similar size and rarity are seldom reported
> in publications, because of the perceived need for hundreds of pictures
> of marginal variations in broken crockery and pages of unreadable and
> unread stratigraphic descriptions.
>
> So the apparent rarity in the record of Rattus rattus and similar sized
> vertebrates is induced by archaeological method. Pity us who work with
> invertebrates!
>
> Okay, I am playing Devil's Advocate, and there are many (and increasing)
> numbers of good practice and good publication. However, we are hampered
> from employing ecological principles to answer wider archaeological
> questions (especially inter-site and inter-regional comparisons) because
> of inconsistent retrieval methods and publication bias.
>
> Archaeology is better than history at understanding the ordinary lives of
> ordinary folk precisely and only because its data is much less biased.
> And 'Archaeology is human ecology', even when Tudors wore the English
> crown.
>
>And there is the cat out of the bag.
>
>Greg Campbell
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