BOAR: A Biocultural Odyssey of Archaeological wild boar-Reconstructing the deep-time dynamics of boar in Britain

Represented on Iron Age gold coins, early medieval helmets, High Medieval and Post-Medieval heraldry, the wild boar has maintained its cultural significance in Britain for over two thousand years, far beyond their presumed medieval extinction on our shores. In recent years, the wild boar has unintentionally made its way back to British soil, with escapees from wild boar farms re-establishing viable breeding populations in multiple regions across Britain.

This has sparked a divisive debate surrounding the wild boar's fundamental right to exist within the British landscape. The future of British wild boar is dependent on contextualising the species' deeper history on the island. However, reconstructing the historical biogeography of the species has long been hindered by issues of identification that span the historical, iconographic and archaeological records.

The BOAR project will implement a multi-scalar interdisciplinary strategy integrating cutting-edge scientific techniques with traditional zooarchaeology, historical texts and iconographic data to not only address this core barrier to furthering historical wild boar research, but also greatly expand on our knowledge of wild boar from the past 10,000-years. This will begin with a macro-scale literature review of existing zooarchaeological literature to establish a database of recorded wild boar from British archaeological sites, iconographic depictions and historical texts, which will establish an expanded foundational understanding of the wild boar's presence in Britain.

This serves to develop more targeted research objectives and identify key study sites for further analysis. I will then apply geometric morphometrics (GMM) and stable isotope analysis to archaeological suid teeth to overcome the problems of domestic pig/wild boar identification in the archaeological record. Exeter is an ideal place to undertake this analysis, with the establishment of its new AHRC-funded SHArD-3D Imaging Lab, directed by Dr.

Carly Ameen (Archaeology), primary supervisor for this project, and expert in GMM. In tandem, all collagen extraction and sample preparation will be conducted at the University of Reading under the supervision of Prof. Stuart Black (co-supervisor of this project).

I will then build a new chrono-cultural timeline of the wild boar's existence in Britain by examining changes to their size, feeding habits and ecology. GMM analysis will be used to examine changes in the size and shape of wild boar, which will be enhanced by an innovative, multi-isotope sampling strategy to further our understanding of dietary, trophic level and mobility changes to investigate anthropogenic influence on wild boar.

This involves the pioneering large-scale analysis of d2H isotopes alongside carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and strontium to create a high-resolution re-conceptualisation of 10,000-years of human impact on the species. These findings will integrated with an extensive literature review, casting a deep sociohistorical lens onto the past to unveil the dynamic interplay between wild boar and societal attitudes.

Finally, the findings surrounding past wild boar will be united with present debates and issues surrounding the modern wild boar in Britain through various placements, collaborations, and extra-institutional public outreach events, serving to provide a deep-time context for very poignant modern issues including conservation and rewilding.