Les coquillages marins apparaissent régulièrement dans les fouilles archéologiques en Flandre, à Bruxelles et en Wallonie. Il s’agit principalement de moules (Mytilus edulis) et d’huîtres (Ostrea edulis), mais d’autres espèces, bien que plus rares, sont également présentes. Ces vestiges sont fréquemment mentionnés dans les rapports et publications archéozoologiques, souvent en tant que simples compléments aux restes de mammifères, oiseaux et poissons, mais ils reçoivent rarement une attention spécifique. Pourtant, leur présence offre des pistes de réflexions intéressantes concernant les échanges économiques, les habitudes alimentaires, ou encore le statut social des consommateurs. Cette présentation propose un survol chronologique des découvertes de coquillages marins dans les contextes archéologiques belges. En replaçant ces données dans leur contexte culturel et géographique, nous tenterons de mieux comprendre la place de ces produits marins dans les sociétés passées au cours du temps.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
Recent studies on animal domesticates (e.g., dogs, cattle, donkeys) have shown that imputing ancient low-coverage genomes can achieve high accuracy, enabling finer-scale population genomic analyses based on haplotypes. However, these studies underscore the lack of a standard imputation strategy, as species-specific factors—such as genetic architecture, introgression from wild relatives, and reference panel composition—critically influence accuracy. Despite being one of humanity’s closest companions, the domestic cat (Felis catus) remains underrepresented in genomic research, leaving many aspects of its evolutionary history unresolved. Ancient and modern genomic datasets for both wild and domestic cats are sparse, with population allele frequencies often inferred from single or few individuals, resulting in potential biases. Addressing these biases requires haplotype-based approaches and thus a tailored imputation pipeline. Imputing cat genomes poses several challenges, including the absence of a high-density genetic map essential for phasing the reference panel. Additionally, only three high-coverage genomes of Felis lybica lybica, the domestic cat’s wild ancestor, are currently available. Including more genomes of wild relatives as well as ancient high-coverage genomes in reference panels has proven to enhance imputation accuracy. To enrich the reference panel, we thus generated novel modern and ancient high-quality genomes (>10X) of both wild and domestic cats. By constructing a fine-scale genetic map and testing various imputation filtering pipelines, we aim to establish a gold standard for cat imputation, enabling robust haplotype-based analyses. This will provide unprecedented insights into the domestication, adaptation, and evolutionary history of domestic cats.
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Bone collagen carbon (δ¹³C), nitrogen (δ¹⁵N) and non-exchangeable hydrogen (δ²H) values of humans, domestic cats (Felis catus), and other animals, were analysed from Late Roman – Early Byzantine (c. AD 350 –700) contexts at Sagalassos in Turkey. Analysed specimens include domesticated animals such as dogs, pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, chickens and geese, a selection of wild taxa, and small animals that likely served as prey for cats. δ²H values, a sparsely utilized isotopic proxy in archaeological research, provide extra information relating to diet, imbibed water sources, and trophic position to help discriminate the isotopic niches of different species. As cats are hyper¬carnivores and non-obligate drinkers, their δ²H values are likely mainly dictated by their diets, which is evident in their relatively high values compared to most other species. Bayesian dietary mixing modelling using all three isotopic proxies was conducted on 16 individual cats to estimate how much of their dietary protein was derived from domestic animals, fish, or hunted small prey. Model results indicate that on average cats consumed mostly domesticated animal meats (~40 ± 20%) provisioned by humans, but supplemented their diets by hunting small commensal and wild prey. Interestingly, the δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N and δ²H isotopic niche spaces of humans overlap the most with cats (92.2%, α = 0.95) compared to any other animal including domestic dogs, suggesting especially inter¬twined cat-human relationships in western Anatolia between the 4th – 7th centuries AD.
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