A Cat Skeleton from the Balatlar Church Excavation Sinop Turkey

摘要

A cat skeleton was unearthed during the 2015 excavation season at the Early Byzantine Balatlar Church complex, by the northeastern Black Sea coast of Turkey. The cat was buried with a human individual. The inhumation was dated back to the period between the end of the 6th century AD and the first half of the 7th century AD. The sex of the human individual remains unknown and the cat has been identified as a female house cat. The skeletal remains in the region of the abdominal cavity, occupied by the stomach in living animal, revealed the remains of a rodent and a house sparrow, eaten only recently prior to cat’s death. This can be interpreted as an indirect proof of the cat’s role as an efficient pest controller, alongside that of being a pet animal. Presenting the zooarchaeological and archaeological evidence, we argue that the Balatlar cat and her possible owner in the “2015-Grave-14” burial chamber demonstrate the most significant direct archaeological evidence of a cat–human relationship in the Byzantine world so far.