Description

Summary: 1 long bone, from Bishops Cannings G76, Wiltshire.

Research results

Animal bone found during excavations of Beckhampton Road longbarrow by Paul Ashbee in 1964. During her reinvestigation of the osseous assemblage of the barrow, Banfield noted the presence of three domesticated cattle bone groups positioned along the length of the barrow on the pre-mound ground surface. Each of these groups appears to have received special treatment and to have been relatively old at the time of death. She argues that these deposits were clearly deliberate, and demonstrate the importance of the community's relationships with domesticated cattle.

In her PhD with the university of Leicester, Bandfield (2018) re-examined the osseous assemblages Beckhampton Road, West Kennet and Cold Kitchen Hill long barrows, as well as material held by other institutions from a number of Neolithic long barrows in the Avebury and Salisbury plain areas. She takes a post-humanist approach to these materials, seeking to re-analyse and re-emphasise faunal assemblages which garnered little attention from the original excavators and in initial post-excavation analyses and publication. In doing so, she illustrates both the potential importance of human-animal relations to the communities who contructed these monuments, but also the significant meaning these remains may have conveyed.