Rus’ and the Golden Horde: Options for Reconstructing Economic Processes by Methods of Archaeozoology

Our analysis of archaeozoological collections found on archaeological sites allowed to build a complex picture of the meat diet of medieval settlements in Eastern Europe and to reconstruct the structure of meat supply in Eastern European towns and villages in forest, forest-steppe and steppe areas, as well as to determine the similarities and differences in this structure across different landscapes and cultural zones. We found that the dominant meat in the diet of the medieval population in all studied landscapes, regardless of settlement form was beef. For Rus’ towns, which existed for several centuries, we identified the tendency to increase the share of beef in the meat diet from the early (12th century) to the latest (16th century and later) periods. Beef also dominated the meat consumption of townspeople in the Golden Horde in the 13th–14th centuries. The study shows that cattle were raised in rural settlements and regularly delivered to the towns for hides and meat. Nomadic cattle, such as sheep and horses were delivered to the towns and slaughtered episodically to produce hides. In the artisanal quarters of the towns, our archaeozoological research registered accumulations of domestic ungulate bones with a specific taxonomic and anatomical set – the remains of large-scale slaughter of nomadic and rural livestock. These quarters also did the primary processing of hides – our study found clear markers of processing industries in archaeozoological collections. The study of isotopes (δ13C and δ15N) in more than 150 bone samples of domestic ungulates of forest and steppe areas proved the feasibility of using 13C isotope tags to capture the status of domestic ungulates: local and outsider; 15N isotope signals describe the contribution of farmed fodder to the diet of specific animals. We managed to discover the movement of nomadic steppe cattle from the arid zone for slaughtering and hides to the forest-steppe Bolgar town, and to record the fact of cattle exchange between steppe and forest territories, as well as between different regions of medieval Rus’.