While it would be ill-advised to use the faunal assemblage data on their own to argue for a particular ethnic or cultural makeup of the Roman-era settlements of the Hungarian Plain, the patterns of domestication seen here are nonetheless revealing of an important general trend. The people who inhabited the region’s settled villages had foodways that were much more like those of the preceding European Iron Age than what we would expect to be the husbandry and culinary habits of nomadic Sarmatian immigrants from the Pontic Steppe. This can suggest three potential scenarios. First, this evidence could indicate that while nomadic and settled people both lived in the region of the Hungarian Plain, they kept apart from each other, practicing different, largely separate forms of subsistence. In this scenario, the material thus far reviewed would reflect only the remains of the settled population. The faunal remains of the nomads, by this model, must lie scattered across
355 Cribb 1990, pp. 27-34; Barfield 1993, pp. 136-140; Khazanov 1994, pp. 69-84; Kradin 2015, pp. 47-53. A visual
comparison of the feces of the three species makes the water-requirements point abundantly clear. The water content of fresh cow manure is much greater than in sheep excrement, which in turn is wetter than the pellet-like goat droppings.
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the regions between settled communities where we can assume the hypothetical nomadic communities held sway.356
A second interpretation of the evidence would be a model of mass immigration followed by rapid acculturation and sedentarization. In this case, we would posit a high degree of interaction between nomadic Sarmatian immigrants and existing Iron Age farming communities in the
Hungarian Plain, with the bulk of the nomadic newcomers settling down and merging with existing populations of agriculturalists. This model would require a power-imbalance in favor of the settled community such that settled life and adoption of existing cultural practices (at least within the realms of food and shelter) would have been appealing to the newcomers. While such an outcome is not impossible, it would buck the trend of usual power dynamics between settled and nomadic communities. With their greater mobility and powerful equestrian military, steppe nomads have usually come out on top in hostile interactions with settled peoples throughout premodern times.357 Even if we discard the notion of hostile relations between nomad and peasant in favor of some more cooperative form of interaction, we would expect some significant additional factor to be in play in order to trigger mass-sedentarization and acculturation. The ecological limits of the Hungarian Plain when compared to the vast Pontic Steppe might serve as such a catalyst, but only if both the incoming population were much larger than what the non-cultivated parts of the Hungarian Plain could support, and emigration back to the greater steppe was also not a feasible option. In our case,
356 Cribb 1990, p. 26. C. labels this type of society a ‘dimorphic state’ or ‘dimorphic chiefdom.’ It is characterized by one
ruler, or ruling elite with hegemony over both a nomadic/semi-nomadic population and a sedentary, agricultural population. Levels of control and interaction between the sectors could vary, and while in theory the ruler could come from either sector, historical cases nearly always show rulers whose background and power base comes from the nomadic sector.
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while movement back and forth between the Hungarian Plain and the Pontic Steppe would have been fairly free prior to the annexation of Dacia, Trajan’s annexations resulted in greater Roman control over the Iron Gates/Cerna-Timiș connection point between the north/west and south/east divisions of the Danubian Basin, severely limiting future freedom of movement.
The third possible scenario involves a more equitable merging of the two hypothetical population groups. In this model, perhaps prompted by diminished grazing land and/or a desire to integrate into existing power and economic networks, immigrant Iazyges would intermarry with existing settled communities but not wholly abandon their nomadic ways. Were this the case, we might expect the development of a hybrid, semi-nomadic society with some members of the community engaged in agriculture and sedentary animal husbandry and others pursuing some form of limited nomadic transhumance, with the region’s settled villages serving as stable population and resource bases. There are plenty of ethnographic and historical examples of this kind of hybrid society. In some cases different clans or families within the community have permanent roles as farmers or herdsmen, with ties of intermarriage and exchange ensuring continued symbiosis between the two divisions. In other cases, individual families or kinship groups each contain nomadic and sedentary elements with blood ties ensuring continued cooperation between the subsistence
divisions. In some such societies, the nomad/farmer division is stable and hard to transgress, while in others, individuals or families may transition from one role to another - sometimes multiple times - over the course of a lifetime.358 Were we to posit such a hybrid society for the population of the Hungarian Plain, we would want to look for material elements reflecting both steppe and Iron Age,
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‘Celtic’ origins within individual settlements and burial grounds. Moreover, to move beyond evidence of cultural exchange to a model of nomadic-sedentary hybridity, we would expect to find some traces of steppe subsistence practices within the settled communities, even as traditional sedentary ways predominated. Looking more closely at the evidence for subsistence from Gyoma 133 and other Sarmatian settlements we find some intriguingly suggestive details, although the picture remains far from clear.
First, when the Sarmatian faunal data are plotted against contemporaneous assemblages from neighboring Pannonia, Dacia, and Moesia, it becomes clear that the people of the Hungarian Plain ate more mutton and less pork than the inhabitants of the surrounding Roman provinces.
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The differences in percentage are not dramatic, but the pattern emerges clearly enough. While the relatively cattle-poor pattern observed in the Moesian material may indicate the influence of a Hellenic pattern of animal consumption,359 the Dacian and Pannonian assemblages represent Roman influences overlaid on essentially the same Northern European, Iron Age substrate postulated for the Hungarian Plain. This is exactly what we would expect given the connected nature of the Middle Danube Basin before the imposition of the Roman limes.
Looking more closely, the fact that we see a fairly clear division between the Sarmatian and Pannonian/Dacian material along pig-sheep lines suggests that something in the cultural history of the provinces vs. the barbaricum pushed Roman and Sarmatian populations towards slightly different husbandry patterns sometime after the establishment of the limes. While the legacy of Roman Italy’s pig-dominated diet may partially be to blame, this influence should not be overestimated. King’s exhaustive surveys of faunal assemblages from across the Roman world clearly indicate that in the Northern European provinces, it was the Roman military diet which exerted the strongest influence, and that pattern - characterized by high levels of beef consumption with relatively equal minorities of pork and sheep/goat - appears to have emerged directly out of preexisting Iron Age practices during Rome’s conquest of continental Europe in the first century BCE.360
One possible interpretation of the preference for sheep over pigs in the Sarmatian material would be cultural influence of sheep-herding immigrants from the Pontic Steppe.361 The
importance of horses at Gyoma 133 and other Sarmatian settlements, including scattered evidence of
359 King 1999, fig. 13.
360 King 1999B.
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horse butchery and ritual deposition,362 may also hint at some degree of steppe influence on husbandry practices in the Hungarian Plain.363 This evidence is suggestive but not entirely conclusive. Even if we accept steppe elements within the cultural complex(s) responsible for the preserved faunal material from the Roman-era Hungarian Plain, we must admit that the influence of these elements on husbandry patterns is greatly outweighed by traditions derived from the sedentary European Iron Age and, as we will discuss below, the demands of the Roman military meat market. Our ‘Sarmatian’ faunal assemblages much more closely resemble Iron Age, ‘Celtic’ patterns than they do our best proxies for ancient steppe husbandry practices, and, as we have seen, the evidence for habitation appears to broadly reflect earlier Iron Age traditions as well.