- Chapter Eleven -
of problems of access and management. It is also likely that any grain stored in such
buildings was kept in sacks or bins. With regard to the actual bulk of the grain needed
for human consumption, half a tonne is small enough to keep within the domestic
house, the grain being ground into flour as required.
Livestock was without doubt important to the Celts but it is virtually impossible
to quantify that importance. The documentary evidence is slight and devolves
primarily upon Caesar's comments that grain and leather were two principal exports.
Britain lends itself to both cereal production in the south-east and pastoralism or
stock-raising in the north-west. Perhaps it is not beyond the realms of possibility
that in Celtic Britain prior to the Roman conquest cattle drives were made from the
northern regions to the south-east ports. If stock is raised for leather only, it is much
easier to move on the hoof and process at the latest possible stage. Perhaps the return
trade was in cereals, needed but difficult to produce in the north-west. Leather, of
course, need not imply only cattle. Sheep and goatskins are equally of value and wool
would logically have been another trading item.
Archaeological evidence is restricted to the usual principal sources: bones,
coprolites, representations like rock carvings and figurines. Occasional discoveries of
hoofprints have been made but these are more curiosities rather than specific evidence.
The bone evidence itself, discovered during site excavations, is not unexpectedly
relatively sparse. In fact, it is surprising that any does survive, given the ways in which
all parts of an animal carcass can be put to good use. Though quantification of bone
evidence is carried out with painstaking care and skill, it is difficult to relate the actual
evidence itself with the organized running of an agricultural unit. Since it is virtually
impossible to date the bone assemblages to a particular century, let alone assign
any contemporaneity within the assemblage itself, it is important to remember that
a decade in farming, like a week in politics, is a long time, certainly long enough to see
shifts of emphasis in a farm's livestock holding - whether by choice or by external
constraint, like disease or extreme climatic conditions or a combination of both. In
recent cool humid summers in the 1990S farmers have lost 50 per cent and more of a
flock to fly strike. Other fatal diseases, not yet eradicated, could well have been present
in the Iron Age. Lung worm and liver fluke were certainly present; if they are
unchecked, these diseases will debilitate sheep to the point of death. Less dramatic in
terms of maintaining livestock numbers is the sheer necessity of providing winter
fodder. If the summer harvest of grass and leaf hay is inadequate, then stock numbers
most certainly would have been reduced in the autumn. There is little point in eating
an animal which has starved to death rather than culling it at its prime in the early
autumn.
If the bones cannot give a realistic idea of proportions of stock, at least they tell
us what kind of stock was kept. That it was ultimately kept for food is shown by the
occasional discovery of butchery marks.
The cattle were by modern standards relatively small. The medium-legged Dexter
cattle are the modern equivalent of the Celtic shorthorn. The Dexter, bred in the
nineteenth century from the Kerry cattle of Ireland and the Welsh Black cattle,
themselves probably descendants of the Celtic cattle, has a number of characteristics
likely to have been present in its remote ancestor. It is a tough, powerful animal
capable of thriving on relatively poor pasture in challenging conditions. Experience
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