Hanging around or moving on up? Multi-proxy perspectives on Bronze Age sheep/goats herding practices in the north-eastern Po Plain (northern Italy)

During the Middle Bronze Age, farming settlements covered much of the Po Plain, but little is known about their herding strategies, e.g. in terms of mobility and foddering. According to faunal data and archaeological materials, herding practices focused on sheep husbandry for multiple products, including wool. Meanwhile, transhumance, involving the movement of flocks from the plain to the upland pastures, has been proposed to emerge during this period, but direct evidence for this practice is scant. To fill these gaps, we employed multiple isotope analyses of faunal remains embedded within palynological, archaeobotanical and micromorphological analyses to uncover sheep husbandry practices at two Middle Bronze Age sites (Oppeano 4D, La Muraiola di Povegliano Veronese) near Verona, northern Italy. These settlements have both stratigraphic evidence of animal penning investigated through high resolution multi-proxy geoarchaeological and archaeobotanical methods. Incremental carbon, oxygen and strontium analysis of sheep molars embedded within a bulk δ13C/δ15N framework from domesticated and wild species indicates that transhumance was not practised at either site. Instead, we demonstrate the seasonal exploitation of local environments for pasturing animals with strong indications for the collection of plant resources for livestock (leafy-hay, grass hay) including the use of C4 plants as cattle feed. This practice of fodder collection may have been an important step in the evolution of herding practices, as it allowed herds to remain within the local area and, at the same time, showing incipient pressure that might have led to the development of more mobile strategies.