ABSTRACT

A large assemblage of small mammal and other small vertebrate bones was excavated within a relatively small area of a single room in a Roman villa close to the River Thames in South Oxfordshire. It is argued that these bones are the remains of barn owl pellets and that their presence shows that the roof on this room at least had remained intact for some time after either the entire building or this particular part of it had been abandoned as human habitation. The remains of several juvenile black rats were contained within the assemblage, making this the first record of black rats from a rural Romano-British setting in Oxfordshire and adding to the extremely small corpus of records of this species from a non-urban location anywhere in the country. Radiocarbon dates place the presence of rats and the abandonment of the villa during the second half of the fourth century.

摘要

在靠近南牛津郡泰晤士河的罗马别墅的一个单人房间的一个相对较小的区域内挖掘出大量小型哺乳动物和其他小型脊椎动物的骨头。有人争辩说，这些骨头是谷仓猫头鹰颗粒的残骸，它们的存在表明这个房间的屋顶至少在整个建筑物或它的这一特定部分被废弃作为人类居住地之后仍然完好无损一段时间。几只幼年黑鼠的遗骸被包含在组合中，这是牛津郡罗马-英国乡村地区黑鼠的第一个记录，并增加了来自英国任何地方的非城市地区的该物种的极小记录语料库。国家。