Echoes from the past

Walrus skull with cut off rostrum
One of the many walrus skulls from Svalbard in the collections of the Bergen University Museum. Parts of the rostrum have been cut away (dotted line) to remove the tusks.

 

The walrus’s most distinctive feature is its tusks. They can grow to up to an impressive meter in length, and both males and females have tusks. Walruses were once very abundant in the Svalbard Archipelago, but were nearly hunted to extinction during the Middle Ages for their ivory. Walrus ivory was very popular during the early Middle Ages, and a famous example of objects made out of walrus ivory are the Lewis Chessmen. The growing trade in walrus products in medieval Europe led to overexploitation of walrus populations, and the population on Svalbard was brought to the brink of extinction. In 1952, walruses on Svalbard became protected. The population is slowly increasing but walruses remain on the Norwegian Red List. 

The Osteological collection of the Bergen University Museum contains many archaeological walrus skulls, such as the one in the picture above, that still bear the signs of this overexploitation. According to archaeologist James Barrett, walruses were slaughtered in a consistent way where the frontal part of the skull, the rostrum, was chopped off in order to remove the tusks. The marks left behind by the chopping can still be seen in many of the skulls (indicated by the dotted line).

More on how the North Atlantic walrus ivory trade was linked to the boom and bust of the Norse settlements in Greenland: https://titan.uio.no/naturvitenskap-livsvitenskap-english/2020/boom-and-bust-economy-greenland-norse-walrus-ivory-trade

Cockfighting in Medieval Norway

Two chicken tarsometatarsi from medieval Norway with their spurs chopped off. Boxes give a close up of the remaining stumps.

 

When PhD student Sam Walker was looking at bird bones from medieval Norway, he noticed a chicken tarsometatarsus with the bony spur, a pointy outgrowth of bone covered by a layer of keratin that projects from the back of the bone in mostly roosters, cut off. Then he found another one. And another one. Now, more than 16 chicken tarsometatarsi from a number of cities in medieval Norway have been found, all with their bony spur partially or complete chopped of. This type of bone modification is typical of cock fighting, an ancient blood sport with a long tradition in many countries. The bony spur is removed and an artificial spur, often made of metal, is attached to the stump. The tarsometatarsi that Sam has found come from all over Norway, suggesting that cockfighting was widespread in medieval Norway. Trading networks between Western Europe and East Asia, where cockfighting has traditionally been very popular, might have introduced cockfighting to Scandinavia. But strangely enough, there is no mention of cockfighting in any historical literature from or about Norway. Why that is the case remains unclear. These peculiar bones therefore look to be the first, and only, evidence we have for cockfighting in Norway.

Walker, S.J. and Meijer, H.J.M., 2020. More than food; evidence for different breeds and cockfighting in Gallus gallus bones in from Medieval and Post-Medieval Norway. Quaternary International 543: 125-134.