‘Go(a)t milk?’ New perspectives on the zooarchaeological evidence for the earliest intensification of dairying in south eastern Europe

The origins of secondary product exploitation for domestic livestock, in particular milking, is a long-standing debate in archaeology. This paper re-analyses zooarchaeological age-at-death data from the central Balkans of south eastern Europe to demonstrate that the earliest intensive milking in this region probably occurred through the exploitation of goats, and not cattle or sheep, and that they were exploited in this manner from the beginning of the Neolithic. The analyses also suggest that there is a change in cattle and sheep exploitation patterns beginning during the Eneolithic, when secondary product exploitation becomes visible in age-at-death patterns, which can be interpreted as an increased scale of secondary products exploitation. This proposal is congruent with the ceramic lipid and zooarchaeological data from the region and has larger implications for understanding and identifying the origins of milking throughout the Old World.