Animal Husbandry, Cultural Change, and Economic Networks: An Archaeozoological Perspective on the Transformation of Iron Age Oppida Societies

In the 2^nd century bce, with the Iron Age Oppida Civilisation, Central Europe experienced an unprecedented degree of urbanization, economic centralization, and supra-regional exchange. However, from 80 bce onwards, in the Northern Alpine Foreland (present-day southern Germany), these structures declined, leading to the abandonment of both urban and rural settlements. Various factors, such as landscape overexploitation and military conflicts, have been proposed to explain this decline. Concurrently, cultural transfer and possible migration movements from the Central German Upland Zone gave rise to the Southeast Bavarian Group (SEBG), an Iron Age community that emerged north of the Alps, differing from Oppida societies in terms of material culture and settlement structure. This paper aims to explore the effects of these socio-economic upheavals on livestock farming by comparing faunal assemblages from the Oppida Civilisation and the SEBG, focusing on two categories of archaeozoological data: species distribution and body size development in cattle. Generally, species distribution patterns in SEBG farmsteads show continuity with the preceding Oppida Civilisation, with the exception of the Langenpreising site near Munich, where a high proportion of sheep could suggests economic influences from the Central German Upland Zone. Osteometric results on cattle breeding prompt the hypothesis that a large-sized cattle type of non-local origin appeared in SEBG contexts. We discuss several potential regions as the origin of this allochthonous phenotype, with the most plausible explanation being that these cattle were possibly transferred from Roman Upper Italy through Eastern Alpine Iron Age communities to the SEBG. However, because of the limited osteometric data set, this is to be seen as a working hypothesis that requires further testing. From an archaeozoological perspective, the end of the Iron Age was characterized by the decline of proto-urban structures on the one hand and the emergence of new economic networks on the other.