Survey of the Remains of Mammals Recovered in the Middle Bronze Age Burials at Sidon (Lebanon) - HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article dans une revue Levant: The Journal of the Council for British Research in the Levant Année : 2004

Survey of the Remains of Mammals Recovered in the Middle Bronze Age Burials at Sidon (Lebanon)

Résumé

The discovery, at Sidon, of a group of burials dated to the Middle Bronze Age – most of which contained animal remains together with human burials – presents a new corpus of funerary offerings and animal sacrifices. The analysis of the animal remains was undertaken in the field at the time of the excavations at Sidon in July 2001. There is little in the way of archaeozoological data on the practices of burying animals and providing food offerings for the dead in the northern Levant and more generally in the Near East; in the southern Levant, however, a larger number of Middle Bronze Age sites have provided data on the animal remains found in burials. For a true understanding of burials and funerary rites it is essential that the animal remains are studied, in addition to and in parallel with the study of the other grave goods found in burials. Of the three types of burials found in the part of the necropolis of Sidon that has been excavated: simple inhumations, jar burials and burials in constructed graves, it is the last which are the richest in animal remains. Very few such remains accompanied the burials in the sand and the jar burials. Altogether, fifteen burials of the twenty excavated contained skeletal material, mainly of mammals, although some fishbones, some fragments of the plastrons of turtles and tortoises and a few shells that have not yet been positively identified were recovered. Among the species of mammals identified, only domestic animals are represented. Given the difficulty, in certain cases, of distinguishing the bones of sheep from those of goats, those remains that could not be precisely determined have been placed in the category 'ovi-caprines'. Also, the terms sheep(Ovis aries), goat (Capra hircus), cow (Bos taurus) and pig (Sus scrofa) are used generically to describe domestic ovines, caprines, bovines and suiforms.The ovi-caprines, that is the sheep and the goats, were found in quantity, whereas the bovines and the pigs were far less numerous. No wild species were found, except for one bone of a small carnivore, which can probably be attributed to a mustelid. Cutmarks were found on some of the bones. Some were burnt.
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halshs-01675812, version 1 (04-01-2018)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-01675812 , version 1

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Emmanuelle Vila. Survey of the Remains of Mammals Recovered in the Middle Bronze Age Burials at Sidon (Lebanon). Levant: The Journal of the Council for British Research in the Levant , 2004, 36, pp.167-180. ⟨halshs-01675812⟩
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