If you want to know how liveable a city is, you can ask the rats. The cosmopolitan rodents will know exactly how resource-rich and wasteful in nutrients their human co-habitants are. Like a warring old couple, ratkind and humankind may find themselves at odds, but one rarely persists for long without the other, and they will keep telling tales on each other, dead or alive. The last point is key – it reminds us how useful faunal facts can be in archaeology.
Some years ago, zooarchaeologist David Orton conceived an ingenious idea to explore the history of trade and urbanism in past societies through their links with rat populations. The way in which these rodents are associated with the ups and downs of trade and settlements of all shades, he reasoned, makes them a perfect agent to rat out the secrets of ancient cities. This idea became the root of the Rattus project, which is now gnawing away at our preconceptions about the urban past at the University of York.
The rodent’s tale
Rats have a successful history of colonising niches around cities and other human settlements in many parts of the world for at least 2,500 years. For about as long, they have also been reviled by their hosts as food pests and agents of disease. Since the Middle Ages, people have blamed them for perpetrating the 14th-century Black Death – though their precise role in transmitting the plague pandemic remains controversial.
