Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 87

The bishop’s beef. improved cattle at early modern Skálholt, Iceland
Scientific Names English Common Names NISP Count
Bos taurus dom. cattle 887
Equus caballus horse 3
Canis familiaris dog
Sus scrofa pig
Ovis aries sheep 27
Ovis/ Capra sp. Indet. caprine 118
Cetacea sp. whale species 2
Alopex lagopus arctic fox 2
Fish sp to be determined 2203
NISP total 4277
Large Terrestrial Mammal 888
Medium Terrestrial Mammal 94
Small Terrestrial Mammal 1
Unidentified mammal fragment 15,294
TNF total 19,519
Table 1. NISP of all species from Skálholt
totally dominated by cattle is. No other
currently known archaeofaunal context
from Iceland has such a high percentage
of cattle bone. In comparison, archaeo-
faunal assemblages írom the medieval
farm sites of Sveigakot and Hofstaðir in
the north of Iceland exhibit far higher
numbers of caprines, with cattle routine-
ly representing between 15-20% of the
archaeofaunal assemblages in the early
period after Landnám, and then falling to
10-15% later in the early medieval peri-
od (McGovern et al 2001, Perdikaris et
al 2004). The archaeofaunal assemblage
from a lower ranking eighteenth-cen-
tury site in NW Iceland, Finnbogastaðir,
has cattle making up roughly 10% of
its assemblage (Edvardsson et al, 2004).
Both the early modern southern farm of
Storaborg and the high status farm of
Bessastaðir near Reykjavik had cattle
making up roughly 30% of their assem-
blages. The higher ranking farm of Viðey
just north of the Reykjavik harbor had
Domestic % NISP Mammals
Cattle (Bos taurus) 84.70
Horse (Equus caballus) 0.30
Dog (Canis familiaris) present
Sheep (Ovis aries) 4.00
Caprine (Sheep and Goat) 11.00
Total Caprines 15.00
Table 2. NISP of domesticates from Skálholt
cattle making up 17% of the total NISP
of the medieval contexts and roughly 7%
of the early modern contexts. Within the
domestic mammals these figures are 41%
for the medieval period and 35% for the
early modern period at Viðey (Amorosi
and McGovern, 1993).
A widely used meat util-
ity measure (Binford 1976) attempts to
evaluate the overall “modified general
utility index (MGUI)”, which provides
a numerical score for each bone element
(including marrow and sinew values as
well as attached muscle meat). While
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