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Supervisors - Professor Umberto Albarella & Dr Lenny Salvagno

Thesis Abstract

The exploitation of draft animals is one of the fundamental features of the social and economic transformations that affected Western Asia and Europe in the fourth millennium BC. It is well-known that the first animal used for this purpose was cattle, but the timing and placing of its earliest use as a working animal in Britain is uncertain. This project investigates multiple lines of evidence, including morphological changes on limb bones, slaughter patterns, and non-osteological indicators such as plough marks to improve our understanding of the origins of draft cattle use and the social and economic changes that such innovation brought to late prehistoric societies in Britain.