Extraordinary Creatures: The Role of Birds in Early Iron Age Slovenia

Adrienne C. Frie

Environmental Archaeology, 2019, vol. 24, issue 4, 400-410

Abstract: Depictions of birds are overrepresented in the Dolenjska Hallstatt culture, and appear on over a quarter of artefacts depicting animals. A wide variety of artefacts with birds have been found primarily in graves, and crosscut gender, status, and age. However, poor preservation of zooarchaeological remains has made reconstructions of lived human-bird interactions difficult. This study uses ecological and ethological data, combined with local imagery, to provide insight into prehistoric human-bird interfaces in this area, and the cultural conceptions surrounding these interactions. Birds would have been a constant presence in the lives of Dolenjska Hallstatt people; however, human relationships with them were based more on observation than direct interaction. Birds were ubiquitous in imagery, and it is proposed that this stemmed from Dolenjska Hallstatt conceptions of birds as important observers of human actions, ritual mediators, and possibly guides or guardians. Their differences from humans and other animals distinguished them – they were set apart, and depictions highlighted non-normative behaviours. Birds in the Dolenjska Hallstatt worldview were more than animals, ascribed extraordinary capabilities that made them ritually potent and richly symbolic creatures.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14614103.2018.1435981 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:yenvxx:v:24:y:2019:i:4:p:400-410

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/yenv20

DOI: 10.1080/14614103.2018.1435981

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Archaeology is currently edited by Tim Mighall

More articles in Environmental Archaeology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().