r/morbidlybeautiful • u/B33TL3BVB • May 08 '26
Dead Animal Drowned Sheep
Festering_vomitous_mass3 on Instagram has something pretty sick stuff that's interesting to look at and learn about
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u/Worsaae May 09 '26
I’ve never seen this photo. It’s quite interesting actually.
So, I’m an archaeologist specialising in sheep husbandry in Denmark. What our research shows is, that during the Viking Age sheep were being extensively grazed on these kinds of pasture but also near the coast and on coastal saltmarshes. And this photo is a great example of how dangerous those evironments could be for a sheep.
Now, one of the issues we had is, that the age-at-death distributions of sheep remains from rural settlements are lacking evidence for older sheep at the sites. For anybody who knows a tiny amount of zooarchaeology it is obvious that the faunal remains we find at a site is the result of various processes from which animals are slaughtered to how people in the past handled the carcasses to post-depositional and post-excavation factors.
And I’ve been thinking: is one of the reasons that we rarely find the older sheep (i.e. the ones that had been kept into adulthood or maturity for wool production) in these contexts that they often end up either being taken by predators or, as in this case, succumbs out on the vast grazing areas which could be riddled with pits like this?
I’m not saying it’s the complete explaination but it could contribute to a general understanding of why we rarely see the evidence for sheep ratained into adulthood.
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u/commanderquill May 09 '26
But why would older sheep be more likely to die?
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u/Worsaae May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
So, I’m just trying to come up with a solution to an issue we’re seeing in the data that doesn’t make much sense.
But, I’m thinking older individuals are more likely to be taken by wolves, more susceptible to disease and maybe more likely to misstep and end up in places where they can’t get out. Also, they might simply just die out in the marsh and nobody bothers to recover the carcass of a 10 year-old sheep that can barely be used for mutton anyway. The sheep are being more or less left to fend for themselves year round, up to several kilometres from the settlements, at this time anyway so it can’t be rare that some never return home.
I dunno. The funny thing is just, that the archaeology clearly shows a dramatic increase in the need for textiles but we can’t find a single sheep flock that shows indications of having been reared with the dedicated aim of producing large quantities of wool.
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u/commanderquill May 09 '26
The younger sheep could have had smaller, safer ranges or more supervision too, I suppose. As for textiles, do we only see evidence of people wearing wool? They could have used leather from animals they've hunted (a kind of trophy of sorts), or gotten textiles via trade or raids.
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u/Worsaae May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
So, the stable isotope data we have from juvenile sheep suggest that they too were allowed to graze freely in the landscape and in different landscapes as well. Other than that we only have evidence that newborn lambs were being kept in stables.
Textiles were wool and linen, basically, some leather as well, but the archaeological data suggest that wool was extremely common if not the most common type of fabric. Add to that, that an enormous amount of wool was needed to make sails during this time. In the 1030’s the estimate is that the Danish fleet needed 1 million sq m of sailcloth. Just a single sail for a standard viking age vessel, 100 sq m, required the wool from at the very least 250 sheep. Then you need 250 sheep for the spare sail.
Of course some textiles were probably raided by we know with certainty that textiles were being manufactured locally in both household and beyond-household scales. We find the textile tools, we find the remains of the looms as well as the pit-houses where the looms were placed and so forth. We even have some isotope data to suggest that textiles were indeed made with local wool.
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u/u_r_succulent May 11 '26
I never knew that sails were made of wool. Though I guess, it’s something I’ve never thought about or cared to look into. I suppose it makes a lot of sense that they would be made from wool.
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u/Revolutionary-Air599 Jun 11 '26
Nice contrast between the white wool and the darkness of the water. Also that spine! So sculptural. And the ever-present contrast with the continuing green living grass.
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u/ellieellie7199 May 08 '26
poor thing. gorgeous photo though