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This is the first of three major archive reports concerning the 1981-1982 urban excavations of The Lanes, Carlisle, Cumbria. It covers deposits from five sites in the southern half of the investigated area. Most of the medieval dates to the early Roman period (late 1st-early 3rd century AD). There is also some material (12th/13th C) material and a little from 3rd-12th century contexts that cannot be dated more closely. All of the contexts appear to represent domestic civilian occupation. The collection is dominated by the bones of cattle, sheep and pigs. Although sheep sometimes rival cattle in terms of numbers of individuals, cattle would have provided the majority of the meat in people's diet in both the Roman and medieval periods. Birds, fish and wild species of mammals (although still of minor importance) provided a greater, more varied, proportion of the diet during the medieval period. Waterlogging of the earlier (late 1st/2nd C) deposits has led to excellent preservation conditions, and the assemblage forms an interesting comparison to the equally well-preserved contemporaneous deposits in the military part of the town. Aspects of animal husbandry and livestock morphology are discussed in detail, and particular attention is paid to a comparison between the civilian and military Roman assemblages. The two subsequent studies will concentrate on the Roman and Medieval deposits, respectively, from the northern half of the area.

Excavations prior to building work on a small part of the Roman fort of Congangis, Chester-le-Street, produced a small collection of animal bones, mainly from the late Roman period. Cattle bones dominate the collection. Sheep/goat, Pig and Dog are also represented. The Roman dog bones are all from small, bandy-legged individuals and contrast with a later, post-Medieval burial from the site. The measurements and morphology of the Roman Cattle bones suggest that two types of animal were present: the indigenous 'Celtic-shorthorn' and a larger type with different horncore morphology. Comparisons with other Roman sites in the north of England suggest that there may be some contrast in the types of cattle used by the Roman military in the western and eastern parts of the territory. The discovery of well-preserved fish bones in wet-sieved samples shows that this aspect of the military diet might be worth pursuing with a larger sample from the site.

This synthesis aims to integrate the main conclusions of the reports on human bones (Henderson, 1988; Mays, n.d.), animal bones (Stallibrass, n.d.) bird bones (Allison, 1988) and fish bones (Jones and O'Connor, n.d.) together with those on molluscs (Thew 1989) and carbonised plant remains (Huntley, 1988). Before the cairn was built, the landscape on the top of the hill had already been cleared, and it remained open grassland (with occasional patches of woodland and of heather moorland) throughout the human usage of the site as a burial or funerary monument. Some of the grassland was grazed turf. The cairn was used intermittently for the interment of cremated and inhumed burials, with at least one (and possibly two) long periods of haitus, when the site became overgrown with rank vegetation. The two rectangular features were kept clean and were used for burning wood and heather fires - were these funerary pyres, or simply cooking fires for food for the living? There is a possibility that these features were also used for the excarnation of cadavers. Some domestic mammals (or joints of meat) were brought to the site. Many of them were immature, and some appear to have been cremated with the corposes, and buried as food offerings. Other bones appear to be the remains of food for the living. The vast majority of the animal bones (like the molluscs) probably derive from animals that simply lived at, in or near the site itself. Most of the mammal, frog/toad, bird and fish bones were probably brought to the site by carnivorous birds and mammals, and deposited in pellets (of owls and birds of prey) or faeces (of mammals). The Cairn would have been made a prominent feature in the landscape and, with human corpses and food debris lying around or buried near the surface, would have attracted many scavangers such as red kites, buzzards, toads, foxes and weasels.