ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the results of the detailed analysis of the hand-collected and sieved animal bones recovered from excavations at Wigmore Castle. While two large medieval and post-medieval faunal assemblages from elite sites in the Midlands have recently been published, there have been no detailed zooarchaeological analyses of castles located in the Marches. The size of the assemblage and the tight chronological control enables existing ideas regarding the exploitation of animals and dietary preferences throughout the medieval and early modern periods to be tested. Considering the small scale of the archaeological intervention, a substantial assemblage of 22,405 mammal and bird bone fragments was examined from the excavated deposits at Wigmore Castle. When quantified by the total number of identified specimens, cattle are the most abundant domestic mammal, followed by pig and sheep/goat. The processes to be considered here are: recovery efficiency, burning, gnawing and post-depositional degradation.
