A beast of serious heft has been felled, which calls for celebration. Through the woodsmoke flakes of meat fall away from the bone into fingers that will burn if they’re not careful and round the fire stories of bravery are told and bone flutes are played. Tomorrow the aurochs bones will be placed in the pit with some ceremony and souls will be fed as well as stomachs.
Aurochs were a type of wild cattle which roamed Europe, Asia and North Africa. The earliest fossils date to around 700,000 years ago, they were extinct in Britain by the time of the Late Bronze Age but the last known animal died in 1627 in Poland. They roamed and grazed in small herds across grasslands and open woodland. Compared to modern cattle they were huge – the males could be up to two metres tall, weighing a tonne, and with curved horns up to one metre long. Archaeologists have been able to form a picture of them using bones, cave paintings and historical descriptions. Domestication of these animals is thought to have begun around 10,000 years ago, with people making use of their meat, hides, milk and bones. Over time they were bred to be calm and obedient.
In 2021 archaeologists from the Museum Of London Archaeology unit excavating the site of a new housing development in Houghton Regis, discovered a mysterious group of pits dating from 8,500 to 7,700 years ago. The 25 pits were laid out in multiple straight lines, clustered around former stream channels. They were round with very steep sides, some flaring out at the bottom into a wider base. The archaeologists found animal bones including aurochs, marten, deer and boar. The aurochs bones were radiocarbon dated and helped the archaeologists fix the date of the pits. There was also evidence of butchery marks on the bones so people were eating the cattle. There is no consensus on the use of the pits but they might have had some ritual or special significance. The pits must have taken real effort to dig, given their depth of 1.85 metres and width of five metres. They are too large to have been for hunting or food storage which led the archaeologists to consider their location near water and the specific alignments on which they were placed as evidence of possible ritual activity.
It’s a tantalising glimpse of our deep past, into what people ate, the beginnings of animal domestication and husbandry, and what communal life might have looked like.
Read the introduction to this series here:
