062: Zooarchaeology: classifying the domestic fauna of the Roman port of Sanisera, Menorca, Spain

General Information

In 2008 the Sanisera Archaeology Institute for International Field Schools began offering courses in classical archaeology on the Mediterranean island of Menorca. Since then, more than 3,400 students from some twenty countries, most of them from universities in the United States and Canada, have come to excavate and to train in archaeology and bioanthropology. We recommend this course to students interested in zooarchaeology, comparative osteology, ancient economy, archaeology and anthropology/bioarchaeology in general.

Sanisera lies on the coast of Sanitja, at the northern tip of the island. It began as a military camp after the Roman conquest of 123 BC and grew into a Roman port that lived off the livestock and agriculture of its hinterland. Between the 4th and 7th centuries its inhabitants built an Early Christian basilica and buried their dead in several necropolises, until the site was abandoned in the 7th century.

The bones recovered at Sanisera are the clearest evidence of what this community lived on. More than half of the remains belong to sheep and goats, and the rest is shared almost equally between cattle and pigs, with smaller numbers of horses, dogs, rabbits, chickens and pigeons. Sheep and goats were slaughtered young, at the age of best meat yield, and are represented mainly by jaws, teeth and the meatiest limb bones; cattle were butchered in the port itself, and pigs, killed very early, are recognised almost only by their teeth. Classifying these remains is especially valuable today because the excavation focuses on the basilica and its cemetery of the 4th to 7th centuries, where animal bones appear alongside the tombs and it is necessary to tell apart what was food and what formed part of a funerary rite.