Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 92

George Hambrecht
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Cattle Long Bone Fusion
* # of elements
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
14*
Femur D
3.5-4
Figure 5. Cattle long bone fusion
one of the artificially polled examples,
infection set in after the removal of the
horn (Fig. 7).
There was a very low ffequency
of naturally polled cattle occurring in the
Icelandic cattle population ffom the Set-
tlement Period to the introduction of new
breeds in the nineteenth century, so it is
statistically unlikely that these polled cattle
were the product of this rare mutation. It
follows that this particular breed of cattle of
unit 454 were either introduced ffom conti-
nental Europe by the Bishop’s household or
bred by them ffom Icelandic cattle.
It is impossible to say with any
great certainty at this point in the research
where exactly these cattle came from, but
it is the case that during the seventeenth
and eighteenth century Europeans were
developing some of their first polled
breeds of cattle, including the Scot-
tish Galloway and the Aberdeen-Angus
breeds that were created and raised solely
for beef production (Van Bath, 1963). It
is also accepted by livestock and agrar-
ian historians that the first dedicated
beef economies in Europe were formed
at this time. Scotland supplied Galloway,
Angus, and Highland beef cattle in large
numbers for the Edinburgh and London
markets (Trow-Smith, 1951, 151-153),
while the Danish nobility supplied the
Netherlands with large numbers of beef
cattle in the eighteenth century(van Bath,
1963, 286). The latter may have been the
source of the bishop’s polled cattle as
there was already a precedent for a beef
cattle economy coming from Denmark. It
is also likely that Denmark imported new
varieties of beef cattle after the cattle
plague of the 1740’s destroyed as much
as half of the Danish cattle population
(Kjærgaard, 1994, 27-28). It is entirely
possible, though not yet investigated,
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