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Going back to the Western neat carving of chicken etc, this is very much the product of the invention and adoption of the carving fork with the finger guard in the late C18th/early C19th. My poster Reare the Goose on my academia.edu page illustrates the previous standard Western way of cutting up a goose, in this instance, using a heavy sharp knife and two fingers to steady the bird. The Books of Carving are quite explicit that the the knife should cut down and through the sternum, for instance. It's been touched on in previous posts but the idea of the bite size chunk is integral to surviving medieval cookery texts, often expressed as "smite hem into gobetts". Smite is a word I particularly like in a butchery context. I have done a fair bit of smiting of beef bones but this does not mean that I employ violence towards my livestock. Most of my cattle management is based on the "Voice of Doom". In the north of Scotland, I would anticipate "excessive" hacking of bones to be related to fat extraction in a time of possible food dearth. There is an abundant experimental archaeology and ethnographic literature on this topic, which can be accessed by putting "bone grease" into Google as a search term. I'm with Dr Deb in thinking that this student's supervisor should have picked up on these points. ________________________________ From: Analysis of animal remains from archaeological sites on behalf of [log in to unmask] Sent: Tue 12/04/2011 23:03 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [ZOOARCH] re bone hacking I also think this an interesting thread: first because the original post (I feel) flirts with making the old 'historical error' of assuming that standards of animal husbandry, or animal rights, now held by people in developed countries were the norm in past times or past cultures; and this made me wonder WHAT the young woman's academic counselor could have been thinking in permitting her to go down that road. But perhaps I misunderstood. Second, because Salima's and Julie's comments got me trying to see out of the ancient butcher's eyes. Surely how you cut up a chicken (or whatever species) depends upon your mental picture of it as an object. For example, back when I was in undergraduate school at A-squared and living in University-sponsored student communal housing, there was a running joke about letting Deb carve the roast chicken because the event was sure to be attended by an anatomy lecture which tended to spoil everyone's appetite. At the opposite extreme are the folks Salima and others mention who cut the chicken up into chunks "regardless of the joints" -- which leads me to think that their mental picture is of a uniform block of material, so that they do the same to the chicken as if they were cutting wood into chunks suitable to fit into a pit or stove. Further on the same thought, I wonder if this is why we see no sawn butchery at Roman Vindolanda. Everything is disjointed, and while there is indeed hacking, it certainly is not crazy. The butchers were using fairly heavy, very sharp iron cleavers, and though they did not hit precisely into the joint space each time, they were obviously aiming for disarticulation rather than 'chunking'. This is true for all food species and in all size/weight ranges, i.e. even chickens and suckling piglets. I've seen good papers in the Roman-era literature showing a skeleton template of, say, a cow which composites the position of all the cut or hack-marks observed for the entire assemblage from a given site. On such a diagram there is a concentration of cuts or hacks at the joints, but there are also quite a few along the shafts. At Vindolanda, I have very few cattle long bones (especially humerus, femur, and tibia) that are not smashed to smithereens, presumably because they were after the bone marrow. Nonetheless even the smashed bones usually have hacked ends, indicating that they were disjointed first. Long bones with hack marks in the middle might thus have been 'baseball specimens', i.e., 'a swing and a miss'. Because one would really have to swing: with the flesh and sinews still on, to cut right through all of it takes a fair amount of force, even with a sharp cleaver. Nonetheless I still wouldn't call this 'crazy' -- maybe the guy was tired at the end of a long day, or a slave in a hurry because being harassed, or schlepping where he could get away with it -- these hypotheses or thoughts are more viable than 'crazy' I think. Cheers all, this is always good fun -- Dr. Deb > Often a random hacking of the animal, regardless of the joints, was > done in ancient (and in much of modern) Egypt > Salima Ikram > > On 12 Apr 2011, at 12:31, KIM DAMMERS wrote: > >> My example is a far cry from the Iron Age, but here it is. Here is >> Korea, animals for meat, especially, but not only, chicken, are cut >> willy-nilly, so that splinters and bone fragments of variable length >> are the norm. The average restaurant exhibits no standard pattern >> of cutting. Joints are more-or-less disregarded or perhaps even >> avoided in cutting up the meat. The cutting for fowl is done with >> scissors. >> >> Kim Dammers >> Konyang U. >> Nonsan >> ROK > > Salima Ikram > Professor of Egyptology > American University in Cairo > P. O. Box 74, Road 90, Tagammu 5 > New Cairo 11825, EGYPT > [log in to unmask] > Fax: 20227957565 > > > > > >