Towards the end of the Bronze Age, vast groups of people gathered for ceremonial meals, where they feasted on pork, mutton and other meats, before tossing the bones onto middens. Now, some 3,000 years on from this “age of feasting”, scientists at Cardiff University have excavated bones from six of these middens (or rubbish dumps), and analysed their chemical make-up to identify how far livestock travelled for these unprecedentedly large events.
The largest midden, at Potterne in Wiltshire, is as big as five football pitches and contains up to 15 million bone fragments. Pork, it seems, was the meat of choice there, with pigs having been driven cross country from Wales, Cornwall, Devon and even Yorkshire. At Runnymede, it was cattle that had come from Wales and other distant places,…
