The Fauna of Umm Dabaghiyah: A Preliminary Report

Extract

The excavations at Umm Dabaghiyah yielded a considerable amount of animal remains. From the rich sample 6,580 specimens could be identified, all from well-dated archaeological contexts.

The species found in the site and their frequencies are shown in Table 1. As Table 1 shows, the fauna of Umm Dabaghiyah has the following main characteristics:

(1) The fauna is not very rich in species; besides the five domestic species it contains only ten wild ones. Even if we add the wild bird species to them, the number of wild species will increase only to twelve.

(2) Although all five neolithic domestic species occur in the sample, animal-keeping itself is of insignificantly small importance compared with hunting; the domestic animals represent only 9·77–13·23% of the whole sample in the different levels. (In fact the domestic ratio is probably a little lower because in all probability also bones of wild sheep and goats occur in the caprovine sample). The overwhelming majority of the domestic sample belongs to the caprovines; the other species are far behind them with alternating frequencies. The domestic animals show well-marked anatomical differences from their wild forms. Local domestication seems to have existed only in the case of cattle.