N Italy Zooarchaeological Dataset

This dataset contains zooarchaeological data relevant to cattle, sheep/goat, and pigs from lowland northern Italy, and an associated R analysis and visualisation script. This dataset supports the journal article:A. Trentacoste, A. Nieto-Espinet, S. Guimarães Chiarelli, and Valenzuela-Lamas. (2023). Systems change: Investigating climatic and environmental impacts on livestock production in lowland Italy between the Bronze Age and Late Antiquity (c. 1700 BC - AD 700). Quaternary International 662–663:26-36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2022.11.005

The majority of the data were collected under the auspices of the ERC-Starting Grant ZooMWest – Zooarchaeology and Mobility in the Western Mediterranean: Husbandry production from the Late Bronze Age to the Late Antiquity (award number 716298), funded by the European Research Council Agency (ERCEA) under the direction of Sílvia Valenzuela-Lamas (2017–2022). This work built on previous data collection undertaken for Trentacoste's (2014) PhD thesis. The dataset was also expanded with support from a Gerda Henkel Stifling Scholarship (AZ 44/F/20) awarded to A. Trentacoste.

The chronological timespan of the dataset is between the Middle Bronze Age and Late Antiquity (c. 1700 BC - AD 700). For details on the methodology underlying the creation of the dataset see Trentacoste et al. (2018) and Trentacoste et al. (2021).

Zooarchaeological data were collected from published sources (see references file), with the exception of some data for the sites of Spina, Vidulis and Aquileia. Metadata for these sites were available in the published literature, but individual data were collected from the archive papers of Italian zooarchaeologist Alfredo Reidel (1925–2014). We are grateful to Francesco Boschin (Università degli Studi di Siena) for access to the archive.

The dataset includes:

Raw biometric data for post-cranial bones for cattle, sheep/goat, pigs, and wild boar on a specimen level. Measurement abbreviations follow Von den Driesch (1976) and Davis (1996; only humerus HT and HTC). File: NItaly_Livestock_Metric_Data.csv

NISP (Number of Identified Specimens) data for site phases with over 100 identified cattle/sheep/goat/pig specimens. [This is a duplicate of the Supplementary Table 1 included with the journal article.] File: Supp01_Site_NISP_Landscape_Data.csv

Location coordinates and information on environmental context: mean, min, and/or max values for a 5km radius for sites with NISP data. Elevation information was taken from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) terrain data from the U.S. Geological Survey (90m resolution; Jarvis et al., 2008). Precipitation data were from World Clim 2.1 (average monthly climate data for 1970–2000, 30 arc-sec; Fick and Hijmans, 2017), and solar irradiance data were from Global Solar Atlas 2.0 (9 arc-sec; developed and operated by Solargis s.r.o. on behalf of the World Bank Group, utilizing Solargis data, with funding provided by the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP); https://globalsolaratlas.info). Soil characteristics were derived from LUCAS topsoil data (500m; Ballabio et al., 2016): clay, silt, sand, and coarse fragments content (%), bulk density, and Available Water Capacity (AWC) for the topsoil fine earth fraction. [This is a duplicate of the Supplementary Table 1 included with the journal article.] File: Supp01_Site_NISP_Landscape_Data.csv

Bibliographic information for each assemblage with indication of whether NISP and/or biometric data was used. File: NItaly_Livestock_References.csv

R script file for the analyses and visualisations in the above journal article. File: NItaly_Livestock_SysChange_Script.R

If you re-use this data, please cite this dataset and the associated journal articles as relevant.