Deer have been central to human cultures throughout time and space: whether as staples to hunter-gatherers, icons of Empire, or the focus of sport. Their social and economic importance has seen some species transported across continents, transforming landscape as they went with the establishment of menageries and park. The fortunes of other species have been less auspicious, some becoming extirpated, or being in threat of extinction, due to pressures of over-hunting and/or human-instigated environmental change. In spite of their diverse, deep-rooted and long standing relations with human societies, no multidisciplinary volume of research on cervids has until now been produced. This volume draws together research on deer from wide-ranging disciplines and in so doing substantially advances our broader understanding of human-deer relationships in the past and the present. Themes include species dispersal, exploitation patterns, symbolic significance, material culture and art, effects on the landscape and management. The temporal span of research ranges from the Pleistocene to the modern day and covers Europe, North America and Asia.
Papers derived from international conferences held at the University of Lincoln and in Paris.
Deer dispersal and interactions with humans
Genetic analyses of natural and anthropogenic movements in deer
Allan D. McDevitt and Frank E. Zachos
Historic zoology of the European fallow deer, Dama dama dama: evidence from biogeography, archaeology and genetics
Marco Masseti and Cristiano Vernesi
Human-deer interactions in Sardinia
Gabriele Carenti, Elisabetta Grassi, Stefano Masala and Barbara Wilkens
Enduring Relationships: Cervids and humans from Late Pleistocene to modern times in the Yukon River basin of the western Subarctic of North America
Carol Gelvin-Reymiller
Cervid exploitation and symbolic significance in prehistoric and early historic periods
Hunting, performance and incorporation: human-deer encounter in Late Bronze Age Crete
Kerry Harris
Archaeozoology of the red deer in the southern Balkan Peninsula and the Aegean region during antiquity: confronting bones and paintings
Katerina Trantalidou and Marco Masseti
The Italian Neolithic Red Deer: Molino Casarotto
Katie Boyle
Evidence for the variable exploitation of Cervids at the Early Bronze Age site of Kaposújlak–Várdomb (South Transdanubia, Hungary)
Erika Gál
Red deer hunting and exploitation in the Early Neolithic settlement of Rottenburg-Fröbelweg, South Germany
Elisabeth Stephan
Red deer antlers in Neolithic Britain and and their use in the construction of monuments
Fay Worley and Dale Serjeantson
Antler industry in the upper Magdalenian from Le Rond du Barry, Polignac, Haute-Loire, France
Delphine Remy and Roger de Bayle des Hermes
Deer (Rangifer tarandus and Cervus elaphus) remains from the final Gravettian of the Abri Pataud and their importance to humans
Carole Vercoutère, Laurent Crépin, Dorothée G. Drucker, Laurent Chiotti, Dominique Henry-Gambier and Roland Nespoulet
Deer stones and rock art in Mongolia during the 2nd–1st millennia B.C.
Kenneth Lymer, William Fitzhugh and Richard Kortum
Zooarchaeological analyses from Roman and medieval UK
Chasing Sylvia’s Stag: Placing Deer in the Countryside of Roman Britain
Martyn Allen
Deer and Humans in South Wales during the Roman and Medieval Periods
Mark Maltby and Ellen Hambleton
Making a fast buck in the middle ages: Evidence for poaching from Medieval Wakefield
Matilda Holmes
‘Playing the stag’ in Medieval Middlesex? A perforated antler from South Mimms Castle – parallels and possibilities
John Clark
Landscapes
Forest law in the landscape: not the clearing of the woods, but the running of the deer?
John Langton
Parks and designed landscapes in Medieval Wales
Spencer Gavin Smith
Preliminary fieldwork and analysis of three Scottish Medieval deer parks
Derek Hall, Kevin Malloy and Richard Oram
Post-Medieval hunting in UK
English icons: The deer and the horse
Mandy de Belin
Femmes fatale: Iconography and the courtly huntress in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Richard Almond
Deer management
Supplemental feeding and our attitude towards red deer and natural mortality
Karoline Schmidt
Estimating the relative abundance of the last Rhodian fallow deer, Dama dama dama, Greece, through spotlight counts: a pilot study
Marco Masseti, Anna M. De Marinis, Nikos Theodoridis and Konstantinia Papastergiou
Karis Baker is Post-doctoral Research Associate in the School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Durham. She is currently working on an AHRC-funded project entitled “Dama International: Fallow Deer and European Society”.
Ruth Carden is a post-doctoral researcher at University College Cork,working on the FORDEER project which will investigate how deer use forests in Ireland.
Richard Madgwick is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University. He is currently working on the 3 year project Reconstructing the Feasts of Late Neolithic Britain.
