Iron Age Dig - Warm fluffy puppy fur cloaks!

[sandbender]

An article and photo gallery in yesterday's Guardian describes an archeological dig at Silchester, England.

"Almost a century before the Romans arrived in 43 AD, a town of up to 10,000 people was laid out at Silchester, with all the characteristics credited to the invaders: a regular grid pattern of streets and narrow alleys dividing plots, supplied with water from wells and springs – a wealthy place minting its own coins and trading in luxury goods with continental Europe."​

Recent finds at the dig include skeletons of young dogs with marks of flaying – suggesting that among its many flourishing Iron Age industries it may have been a centre for the trade in warm fluffy puppy fur cloaks.

Original story here.

 

[Cobweb]

Woah, sounds harsh but look at the fashion industry's greed for fur nowadays. Some of the vids I've seen are much harsher.
Interesting read nonetheless, thank you for the linkage

 

[Matt.S]

Is dog fur any worse than wearing, say, sheepfur/sheepskin?

 

[MartinK9]

Is dog fur any worse than wearing, say, sheepfur/sheepskin?

Only to the dog

 

[British Red]

Any view that skinning one animal being worse than another is just illogical to me - or at least illogically emotional. Now skinning a useful working animal like a dog does seem a bit strage.

Skinning cats however - nice fluffy coats and good for very little else.............

 

[sandbender]

I wouldn't imagine that either dog or cat fur would be of much use for cloak, I'll stick to wool, easier to remove from the animal and nicer to eat when its had its day.

 

[British Red]

I wouldn't dismiss fur out of hand. I have a beaverskin waistcoat that is bot warm and sheds water very well

 

[sandbender]

I wouldn't dismiss fur out of hand. I have a beaverskin waistcoat that is bot warm and sheds water very well

I can picture that, bone buttons I'd wager.

 

[John Fenna]

Well - did they eat the mutts as well?
If so - no waste! Work the mutt until it is too old to be useful then recycle it as Cornish Pasties and a warm cloak!
If it was pups then it could be a case of the tribe/clan just having too many mutts to train!
As to cats...I am sure that some food outlets were prosecuted a while back for serving cat as chicken....and the fur trade has been known to uses cat skins as well!
Remember Red, cats CAN (but often do not!) keep down vermin as well as being good for...oh -I cant think of anything else!.....

 

[Draven]

Any view that skinning one animal being worse than another is just illogical to me - or at least illogically emotional. Now skinning a useful working animal like a dog does seem a bit strage.

Skinning cats however - nice fluffy coats and good for very little else.............

A cat fur industry wouldn't have been a particularly easy one to maintain in those days, unless they bred cats specifically for it which seems unlikely to me, but that's just me. I mean, would you spend all the time and effort hunting cats for a small fur, or would you walk up to a sheep and kill it for a much bigger and probably better waterproofed fleece? Dogs, however, could be killed and skinned after their working life was over. Killing young dogs, unless there was something wrong with it or it was unusually/impractically aggressive, seems odd though, as you say.

As for "illogically emotional", yes. Humans have so many flaws don't they?

Pete

 

[sandbender]

"...spend all the time and effort hunting cats..."

Hunting cats, thats easy, now herding cats thats where the real skill is!

 

[British Red]

I can picture that, bone buttons I'd wager.

Mais non


antler toggles


I'm never convinced by the "hunt big" thing. Without preservation for the meat, little and often makes more sense a lot of the time. Now I grant you drying and even salt preservation would have been possible - but why bother if meat is available?

Rabbit skin cloaks are nothing new - so wht not cat skin? Or puppy skin come to that? I wonder if as JF suggests they may have just been "surplus" in a pre neutering society.

Waste not want not!

 

[Draven]

Rabbit skin cloaks are nothing new - so wht not cat skin? Or puppy skin come to that? I wonder if as JF suggests they may have just been "surplus" in a pre neutering society.

Waste not want not!

Can't be sure, as I've not really looked into this sorta thing (I love cats - alive, mind you!) but would expect that Rabbits are more suitable because they breed faster and are generally more common - lot of places where if you killed enough cats to make a couple cloaks, you'd probably have exhausted the local supply. Rabbits breed like... rabbits

 

[British Red]

True - but people have made cloaks from ermine and fox...so why not others?

Mind you - not sure when domestic cats came into this country tbh?

 

[Draven]

That's a fair point actually. I think I recall it being mentioned that they came with the Romans, but I may be wrong there.

 

[wildrover]

I thought the romans brought the rabbits.
Didn't know about the cats tho'

 

[dogwood]

Well - did they eat the mutts as well?
If so - no waste! Work the mutt until it is too old to be useful then recycle it as Cornish Pasties and a warm cloak!

I would imagine they did eat the dogs

Over here, eating dogs was absolutely commonplace among Native American cultures. In fact, the Lewis and Clark expedition routinely bought dogs for meat from the Native Americans.

I'm not aware of any primitive culture that did *not* eat dogs.

 

[IJ55]

I wouldn't dismiss fur out of hand. I have a beaverskin waistcoat that is bot warm and sheds water very well

Now British Red, I would kindly like to know where the heck you got that from, because I want one. I wore one in Canada a few years back whilst my kit was drying out and it was so damn warm and snug I cried when I had to hand it back.

UK brought or overseas?

 

[British Red]

Gift from abroad - startlingly good aren't they?

 

[Matt.S]

Rabbits were out of the question (and off the table) in Britain until the Romans came along, so says the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/pets/rabbits.shtml

Domesticated sheep breeds today are very different to those around in Britain 2000 years ago; as I recall from my zooarchaeology lectures sheep hair was closer to that of a dog (short, wiry and moulted) than what one gets from a Leicester Blueface. Considering what alternatives the natives (I refuse to call them 'Celts') had (roe and red deer, cattle, horse, red squirrel, wolf, fox, wild boar) I don't think there was much difference warmth-wise, and as already mentioned by others dogs were 'to hand' and there may have been a large number of 'surplus' pups. Not to mention the amount of Chinese food they could have made if only they knew how to extract MSG!