Sacred offerings or profane waste? Burned animal remains as an indication of Bronze and Iron Age disposal strategies

Carbonised and calcined animal bones are regularly present in archaeological contexts. If they appear in combination with human burial sites, especially cremations, their function as food offerings is a safe guess. The occurrence of burnt animal bones in only small quantities rarely causes debate, as faunal remains usually come into contact with heat during food preparation - for example cooking over an open fire or in an oven, resulting in partial carbonisation - which can extend to the complete destruction of the organic components (calcination). However, if burned and calcined bones are present in unusually high proportions, they often provoke the impression that they are the relics of religious acts, e.g. ritual feasts or burning sacrifices. This study uses the faunal remains from two Bronze to Iron Age sites in the Jülicher Börde (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) to demonstrate that not only the location and situation of the deposit, but also, in particular, the distribution of burning traces on the various skeletal elements found in the different animal species, can provide important information about profane or religiously motivated deposition.

Archaeology · Bronze · Bronze Age · Calcination · Food preparation · Food processing · Zooarchaeology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Chemistry · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies · History · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology