Much of the work on animal bone this year has been for units other than SUAT itself. GUARD commissioned an update of the Urquhart Castle report, with the intention of pulling together all the work done at the site and publishing the end result on SAIR. This gives a good opportunity to present all the data which would normally be edited out of a shorter publication. Also for GUARD, an animal bone report was produced on an Iron Age/Norse site in Unst, Shetland. Unsurprisingly, as well as the usual domestic mammals, seals and whales were exploited here, perhaps reflecting the harshness of the island environment.

CFA also continued to use our services, commissioning reports on bones from Aberlady, North Berwick, Leith and Carnoustie. It was no surprise to find that the medieval assemblage from North Berwick contained gannet bones. These were evidence of the exploitation of birds caught on or near the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, which in summer seethes with nesting birds.

An excavation by Murray Archaeological Services on the High Street in Elgin, adjacent to Bill Lindsay’s 1970s site, provided another opportunity to revisit the past, in more ways than one. There was a great deal of evidence for the skinning of dogs and cats, which were then disposed of in wells, as at other sites in Elgin. Wells seem to have provided a good opportunity for the skinners to dispose of their rubbish, where it was joined by the detritus from antler and horn working, as well as domestic debris originating from food. It is to be hoped, for the sake of the Elgin population’s health, that this rubbish accumulated after the wells had ceased to supply water for domestic purposes.

At Dunure Castle, Argyll, a site excavated by Tom Addyman, the animal bone assemblage again provided evidence that life could be hard for coastal dwellers. The desire to extract as much food value as possible from the available animal carcasses seems to have led to particularly heavy butchery. This is probably an indicator of the low economic status of the people who were using the castle in the early 17th century. There was also some evidence that foxes were skinned, and their meat perhaps eaten, if not by humans then given as food to dogs.