Dog and Human Sepultures at Peltuinum (L’Aquila, Italy)

Peltuinum is a Roman town in the central Apennines founded in the mid-1st century BC and abandoned in the 5th century AD when struck by violent earthquakes. The archaeological campaigns led to the discovery of three atypical funerary contexts in abandoned theatre structures (five shafts and a sewer) and of the city walls (a tower). All three sites show a strong association of human, dog, and other faunal remains. Still, they differ by the modality of deposition, the age at death profile of the human individuals, the number of associated dogs, and the presence/proportion of other domestic fauna, suggesting different interpretative scenarios. In this paper we describe the cases focusing on the dogs’ remains in relation to their symbolic role. The analysis focused mostly on the dog remains from the shafts to understand whether there was a choice in the type of dog to be sacrificed based on certain characteristics such as sex, size and age