INTRODUCTION

There are various strands of evidence that suggest hunting might have been a popular pastime in Roman Britain. According to Strabo, writing at the time of the Emperor Augustus, hunting dogs were one of the items exported from late Iron Age Britain. Hunting is mentioned several times in the Vindolanda writing tablets, and hunting imagery is found in a wide range of contexts such as mosaic floors, large pieces of silver plate and pottery hunt cups. This range suggests that scenes from the hunt were attractive to people both at the upper end of the social hierarchy, and those further down it.

This apparent popularity of hunting as a pursuit is puzzling when viewed from the perspective of animal bone assemblages. Unlike modern British practice which has been, in Oscar Wilde's classic definition ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’, the species shown being hunted in the Roman scenes – deer, boars and hares – are all edible ones. If these animals were regularly being hunted, it is to be expected that this would be reflected in the animal bone assemblages. Certainly in the medieval period, when hunting was the preserve of the aristocracy and a popular pursuit amongst them, there is a noticeable increase in deer bones on the sites where they lived. On all types of Romano-British sites, by contrast, evidence for game is generally rare and often absent.