The subject is not so much off the linguistic interest (see below) as it
seems, so I'd like to pursue this line a little further.
Pjotr, sure we were talking about prehistoric BONES in an archaeological
record, but the whole point about archaeology is to envision the LIVE flocks
to understand life in ancient times, so we always need to have a look at
modern customs, too.
Modern flocks in Crete (often about 1000 animals per shepherd family)usually
have a twofold structure: one half consists of (comparatively few, about 1m
: 10 up to 30 f ) male and immature female sheep (until they produce the
first lambs); this flock is called 'astEra' ('astira', 'steriles', until
their first product, the lambs in the end, they don't produce - milk, meat,
little wool - and eat only) and is often kept on far mountain slopes (so
wouldn't add to the kill-off group). The second half consists only of adult
females (and their lambs for about forty days that are then slaughtered
_somewhere_ all together at the beginning of milking season). The lambs for
reproducing the flock are kept apart for a while and then adjoined to the
astira.
The most important feature in the bones record here would be: more females
than males, a lot of adults, hardly lambs (because one community can't eat
250 lambs at a time, and they have to be sold elsewhere). If the flocks were
smaller (and lambs could be consumed locally) it would still be noted that
all small bones would have to come from lambs about 40 days of age (they
have only 10kg at that time, but it's the ideal time to start milking). For
producing a large amount of meat nobody would slaughter immature lambs but
wait until they're grown up (as the shepherds here do: they eat at least 90%
adult sheep).
So you see why the large amount of dead lambs (IF 'immature' in your
reference means lambs!) for me fits better the milking scheme (and no
other).
Back to the Bronze Age and linguistics.
The point of wool production has already been discussed by Mycenaean
scholars in studying the over 800 Linear B tablets from Knossos dealing with
sheep (probably listing around 100 000 sheep belonging to the Knossian
administration (that means: we're probably talking here about Cretan flocks
as large as today).
There are two typical ideograms for sheep in LB: one for rams, one for ewes.
Now Knossos shows an alarmingly high amount of rams (which, as you see
above, for modern Cretan flocks would be nonsense).
THIS accounts for wool production: rams for reproduction can be few (see
above), but for wool production in ancient times males were castrated and
then these wethers constituted the main part of some flocks (cf. Chadwick
1976).
Interestingly, by the way, the sums in additions of males and females (in
ideograms) were given by a male sign!! (a bit of grammar which, I suppose,
gives us a glimpse into preferences of sexes in Mycenaean society...)
Additionally there was also a third entry given which vexed linguists
(qualified by the abbreviation 'ki'). By thinking over the necessity of a
large administration to manage all the wool-wethers, they decided the
'ki'-sheep would have to be lambs as they were also listed together with
ewes. So Killen (1964) reached the conclusion: different abbreviations in
the tablets were meant to mean 'old', 'young', 'this year's' and 'last
years', showing the kind of management these Bronze Age flocks were subject
to from the central administration (probably calculating the amounts
necessary for a future requirement of wool etc.).
Goats are a different subject again (by the way: in ancient archaeological
contexts with much destruction often bones of sheep and goats cannot be
distinguished by archaeolzoologists, it seems), there is also a sign (the
'ra'-goat) that couldn't been explained yet by linguists, also one of the
commodities (measured by weight) produced by goat-flocks is still unknown
(the other is horns, a commodity modern people wouldn't necessarily think
of, but very important as basis for tools in BA and Neolithic).
As you see linguistics can have quite a lot to do with 'counting sheep'!
>Bones give us information about kill-off patterns, not about the
composition of the flock itself.<
They do, to a certain extent, give us information on the flocks, too,
because I hope to have shown that eating immature sheep is rather a sign for
milk-production (you just don't need all the lambs). A 'wool-producing'
kill-off pattern would contain in a case as the Knossian wool-flocks a
larger amount of adult MALES (because you eat what you have, mainly),
whereas milk- production would show in a rather larger amount of adult
FEMALES (together with the case of the slaughtered lambs, that would be more
males than females, in this case more often kept to reproduce the largely
female adult flock.)
Best wishes from Crete (where many ewes still have small horns as in
antiquity).
Sabine