139 Animal Husbandry: the Mammal Bone Chapter 8 Animal Husbandry: the Mammal Bone Jennifer F. Harland cable. When this procedure would have resulted in excessively tiny sample sizes the data are combined and potential recovery biases discussed in qualitative terms. 8.3. Methods The Quoygrew mammal bone was recorded using the York System (Harland et al. 2003). Under this system, elements are divided into quantiication codes (QC), with QC1 representing the suite of commonly identi- ied elements for which all relevant information is recorded. They include long bones, mandibles, the pelvic and shoulder girdles and select regions of the cranium. Other elements, including ribs and vertebrae, were assigned to QC0 and were not identiied unless of special interest (if they exhibited a cut mark, for example). Specimens from the ‘large mammal’ category are likely to be catle (with potentially some horse), ‘medium mammal 1’ fragments are likely to be caprine or pig, and ‘medium mammal 2’ fragments are from dog- or cat-sized animals. For simplicity, the very few probable identiications have been grouped with deinite ones as they do not alter the overall interpreta- tions. All sheep and goat identiications are included in the caprine total. Only one goat was positively identiied at Quoygrew, so most are probably sheep. Mammal-bone preservation was explored using bone surface texture, scored on an ordinal scale, and fragmentation, assessed as percent completeness (see Section 8.4 below). Evidence of gnawing, burning, partial digestion and/or other modiication was also recorded. Phase 1 of the Farm Mound and Phases 2 to 3 of the Farm Mound and Fish Midden provide the most useful data. Only limited observations can be made regarding the other deposit and phase groups because of their smaller sample sizes. Butchery marks were recorded manually on cards, later digitized onto composite drawings of the skeleton during analysis. Butchery evidence was classed as either a ‘knife’ or a 8.1. Introduction Mammal bones were recovered from several areas and phases at Quoygrew, permiting intra-site spatial and temporal analysis. Most of the analysed material (85%) was from the Farm Mound and the Fish Midden. Changes through time can be examined within the Farm Mound, between the earlier Phase 1 and later Phases 2 to 3, while spatial variation can be examined between contemporary (Phase 2 to 3) layers in the Farm Mound and Fish Midden. Other deposit and phase groups examined contained only small quanti- ties of mammal bone (the North and South Middens, the Phase 4 midden from Room 4 and the loor depos- its from House 1 and House 5). In total, approximately 38,000 mammal bones were examined (weighing 60 kg), of which 8616 (weighing 45.6 kg) were identi- ied to taxon (Table 8.1). Overall, the mammal bone evidence illuminates changes in animal husbandry at Quoygrew that are contemporary with the increase in sea ishing (Chapters 5 to 7) and implies a similar need to produce a greater storable surplus. A possible subsequent change in animal husbandry concurrent with the late medieval decline in ishing is more dif- icult to evaluate due to the small number of mammal bones recovered from the Phase 4 midden of Room 2. 8.2. Recovery The analysed mammal bone was recovered predomi- nantly by sieving to 4 mm (the Fish Midden and the relevant loor deposits of Houses 1 and 5) or by a combination of hand collecting and sieving to 4 mm (the Farm Mound, the North and South Middens and the Phase 4 midden in Room 4). A much smaller quantity of identiiable material, mainly of mice and voles, was also recovered from the 2–4 mm sieve fractions of selected lotation samples (the same ones used for study of the ish bone, see Chapters 5 and 7). The zooarchaeological evidence from each recovery method has been tabulated separately where practi-