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The presence goat\/sheep would indicate that a tilery was integrated with or at least located close to a farmyard or pasture. \u00a0Cattle prints are dominated by those made by new-borns unsurprisingly as a brick stood on by a fully grown cattle would be rendered useless.\u00a0 Cattle calve all year round, whilst not indicative of seasons, it is indicative of animal breeding and dairying.\u00a0 Whilst young and new-born sheep footprints evidence the season in which tiles were left out to dry as the lambing season peaks in March and April.<\/p>\n
Mammal prints are dominated by domestic species with dogs representing nearly 75% of the prints identified in the Silchester collection with cat prints accounting for a further 16%.\u00a0 The wide range of dog pawprint sizes reflects the variability in the sizes of dog breeds in Roman Britain, although, the pawprint does not give indication of the breed or age of the animal.<\/p>\n Conditions in Roman Britain certainly offered scope for a mixed avifauna, even though the extent of \u2018wild\u2019 areas was probably not significantly greater than it is today. Seasonality of brick-making is also identified in the bird prints, with the example of a crane print being small and therefore made by a young bird.\u00a0 Crane colts generally hatch from May to July.\u00a0 The wild bird prints include both wading and perching species evidencing the proximity of the freshwater and woodland to the kilns.\u00a0 The domestic bird prints identified were made by chickens, with one example showing a bent fourth toe, evidencing a previous breakage with sufficient rehabilitation for the bird to be walking across drying tiles.<\/p>\n Both red and roe deer prints have been identified on Silchester bricks.\u00a0 Roe deer favour wooded habitat, again showing a proximity of woodland to the kiln.\u00a0 Red deer prints identified included both adult and young animals, with hinds calving between mid-May and late-July.\u00a0 Red deer also inhabit wooded environments and are often found on farmland fringes.<\/p>\n The footprint evidence from the Silchester assemblage does not point to large-scale farming activities taking place alongside tile production. The Romano-British rural landscape was a mixture of arable, meadow and pasture land, dotted with small settlements and farms with some evidence of woodland clearance. The domestic species identified from the footprints suggest small-scale animal husbandry which would not be incompatible with the time-consuming practice of tile production. The keeping of some livestock would be more manageable than maintaining arable crops where the seasonality of crop management and tile production would invariably clash. The scale of some of the Romano British brick and tile making complexes with multiple kilns operating and the amount of work that would have been necessary for the construction, maintenance, and operation of these would make any supplementary time-consuming activities improbable. Some tile-makers were, it seems, engaged in livestock rearing albeit on a smaller scale than typically assumed and perhaps only to meet their own subsistence needs. An impression of the landscape and environment surrounding the tileries can also be derived from the footprint evidence. Unsurprisingly, it shows that tileries were situated close to both wooded areas and water sources, both key resources needed for the large-scale production of ceramic building materials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/silchester\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/33\/2019\/11\/pawprints-805x1024.png\")
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