A Murder of Crows

Today I made a flying visit to English Heritage's office in York to see the Regional Science Advisor and my good friend, Dr. Andy Hammon.  Before becoming a faceless bureaucrat Andy was once an archaeo-zoologist, so I hoped he'd be able to identify the bird type in the animal grave.

As a reminder, here is the bone assemblage recovered from pit fill (105).  Only about half of the small pit was within the test-pit, so we recovered only a partial assemblage.

It was fortuitous that on the day that I visited Andy, his colleague Dr. Eva Fairnell was in the process of cataloguing a collection of animal and bird skeletons and we had a lot of reference skeletons to hand.  My prediction that it was a pit full of pigeons was quickly demolished when Andy identified the bones as belonging to Corvids, with a single rogue amphibian bone in the mix.  The family Corvidae includes, rooks, crows, jackdaws, magpies and jays. The reference collection helped us narrow the bones down further to rooks/crows or jackdaws. Also, the bones were all from individuals that were not quite fully grown ("sub-adult").  Here is Andy's catalogue of the bones.

Juvenile jackdaw/rook/crow

MNI = 4

4 x left carpometacarpus

1 x right carpometacarpus

4 x left tarsometatarsus

2 x right tarsometatarsus

1 x right ulna

1 x left ulna

1 x pelvis

Assorted cranial and mandible fragments

1 x amphibian femur

Interestingly, one of my suspicions about the group was confirmed: there was more than one bird in the pit.  MNI = 4 refers to the "Minimum Number of Individuals" present in the assemblage.  In this case there were 4 left carpometacarpus or wing bones, meaning that there were at least four birds in the pit.

So, how to interpret four crows in a pit?  Three possible interpretations spring to mind: 1) A pet burial 2) Food disposal 2) Vermin disposal

1) Pet burial - These features are common in the back gardens of houses from the 19th to 21st Centuries.  I suspect that most readers will have planted at least one beloved pet in their back garden, myself included (sadly, these are quite often disturbed by archaeologists).  Crows, rooks, and especially jackdaws were often kept as pets, however I find it difficult to believe that four such pets would die and be buried at the same time.  Also, the stratigraphic sequence suggests that this pit probably pre-dated the construction of the row of townhouses along Acomb Road, so it was not dug in a backgarden at all.  More likely, in the mid 19th Century, this was a bit of agricultural land or open ground outside the core of Holgate village. 

2) Food disposal - The American euphemism for humiliation notwithstanding, crows were sometimes eaten even into the 20th century, and apparently remain a delicacy in Lithuania to this day.  This reminds me of the nursery rhyme containing the line "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie".  Sometimes clear evidence for butchery can be found on animal bones, or the assemblage can consist of the choicest cuts of meat.  Neither is true of this assemblage.  In fact, the bones present in the pit were predominantly the upper parts of the skeleton, and we may presume that the un-excavated half of the pit contained the lower portions.  The suggestion is that the birds were buried whole and therefore not the remains of a meal.

3) Vermin disposal - Corvids can be opportunistic predators and scavengers and may well have been considered vermin by the agricultural/horticultural workers in the vicinity, and disposed of when the opportunity arose.  The fact that the crows were all sub-adult and disposed of together possibly supports this.  

I think on balance, that a brood of young crows was killed as vermin and disposed of in the pit at a time when the land was in agricultural use.  Not long afterwards, in the late 19th Century, the village of Holgate expanded across the site and I can only presume that this probably commonplace rural practice was replaced by a more urban sensitivity that most of us would be familiar with today.  

I should point out that I really like crows.