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Recently published research focused on the bones of birds of prey spanning the early Bronze Age to the medieval period has revealed striking differences between their eating habits and those of modern raptors.
Researchers at the University of Reading analysed carbon and nitrogen isotopes preserved in the skeletons of more than 30 birds, including red kites, buzzards, and white eagles, from around Oxford, Winchester, and London. This revealed that, rather than hunting for prey as might be expected, birds living in these areas between c.2300/2000 BC and AD 1400 were instead feeding on scraps scavenged from waste discarded by humans.
The study forms part of the Animal Feeding Project, which is exploring the human fascination with feeding animals. As part of this work, analysis of contemporary documents suggested that raptors were fairly numerous in the medieval period, and that their feeding habits had gained them a reputation as pests. For example, the 16th-century Vermin Act (‘An Acte for the Preservation of Grayne’, 1566) targets all three species analysed in the study, and many other sources describe them as culprits in stealing food from markets and snatching it from people’s hands in towns and cities.
Today, birds like red kites retain a reputation for scav-enging food from humans, and are still labelled by some as a ‘pest’ animal. However, modern raptors predominantly sustain themselves by hunting small mammals, with scavenging serving as a supplementary food source; by contrast, their archaeological counter-parts showed an extremely similar chemical signature to human bones from the same period, suggesting a diet almost entirely sourced from scavenged food. This difference, the researchers suggest, might be due to a historical lack of rabbits, which form a key staple of raptor diets today, but were not established in Britain until the Norman Conquest. (Infrequent earlier examples of rabbit remains are known, such as a bone discovered at Fishbourne Roman Palace; see CA 352.) The scavenged food that the historical birds were consuming instead included waste from processing sheep, cows, and pigs for human consumption in urban areas.
The study’s findings offer interesting insights into the visual landscape of medieval towns such as Oxford, Reading, and Winchester. ‘Historic towns provided a substantial enough quantity of waste to support animal communities, even ones that may not seem particularly urban today – which has interesting consequences for biodiversity and how we view “natural” versus “human” landscapes,’ Juliette Waterman, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Reading, and lead author of the project, explained, adding that the research has highlighted the importance of researching wild as well as domesticated and farmed animals in the study of human and animal coexistence in past societies.
The team next intend to focus on white-tailed eagles, which made up only three of the tested samples in the raptor study. Through this work, and potential projects investigating wild animals in archaeological towns more generally, it is hoped that the study could prove valuable for managing growing raptor populations in the modern day, as well as informing studies of the relationship between wild animals and urban populations in the archaeological landscape.
The research, titled ‘Tracking 4,000 years of raptor diets through isotope analysis reveals urban scavenging with implications for conservation’, has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. To read it in full, see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440324002152?via%3Dihub (free, open access).
Text: Rebecca Preedy
