THE BISHOP’S BEEF: Improved Cattle in Eighteenth Century Skálholt
The excavations at Skálholt, the cathedral/farm of the Bishop of southern Iceland, afford an excellent case study of a culture of contact in an archaeological context. A dump of cattle (Bos taurus) bones from the turn of the 17th/18th centuries at Skálholt has revealed what was a radical new attitud...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.530.691 http://www.stanford.edu/dept/archaeology/journal/05Hambrecht.pdf |
| Summary: | The excavations at Skálholt, the cathedral/farm of the Bishop of southern Iceland, afford an excellent case study of a culture of contact in an archaeological context. A dump of cattle (Bos taurus) bones from the turn of the 17th/18th centuries at Skálholt has revealed what was a radical new attitude towards agriculture, diet, law, fashion, and ideology. In this case, a culture of contact was not formed among radically different ethnicities or civilizations but among ideologies and fashions, reflecting on one hand the “Enlightenment ” movements of continental Europe, and on the other, the medieval Norse culture of Iceland which contained many elements of continuity going back to the 9th century Settlement Period. The Bishops tried, and ultimately failed, to introduce a beef cattle economy to Iceland, an exceptional situation in the North Atlantic region during almost any period. A new breed of cattle, visibly different from the native Icelandic cattle, was introduced specifically for this purpose. Alongside this new breed, Icelandic cattle were themselves physically altered to look like the newcomers (possibly in an attempt at Lamarckian breeding). A hybrid faunal landscape |
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