The 1st millennium CE represents a period of significant change in the agricultural landscape of southern Italy. Sheep and goats are among the most common faunal remains recovered from archaeological excavations of this period, but the contribution of these animals to the agricultural economy (particularly wool production) is often discussed through textual sources. This paper synthesises caprine taxonomic abundance trends using a Bayesian multilevel modelling approach that employs a beta-binomial distribution to address the problems of overdispersion and unequal assemblage/group sizes. Our models contribute directly to the problem by suggesting a period of change in livestock management practices around the 4th and 6th centuries CE, when the region's shift to cereal farming appears to be accompanied by an increase in sheep and goat numbers.

中文翻译：

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公元 1 世纪意大利南部绵羊和山羊分类丰度趋势：NISP 数据集的多级贝叶斯建模


公元 1 世纪代表了意大利南部农业景观发生重大变化的时期。绵羊和山羊是这一时期考古发掘中发现的最常见的动物遗骸之一，但这些动物对农业经济（尤其是羊毛生产）的贡献经常通过文本来源进行讨论。本文使用贝叶斯多级建模方法综合了山羊分类学丰度趋势，该方法采用 β 二项式分布来解决过度离散和组合/组大小不相等的问题。我们的模型通过表明公元 4 世纪和 6 世纪左右畜牧管理实践的变化时期，该地区向谷物农业的转变似乎伴随着绵羊和山羊数量的增加，从而直接导致了问题。