Beaver

[Animal exploitation at the Mesolithic site Galgenbühel/Dos de la Forca, Salorno (BZ): the macrofauna] – Faunal remains from
Galgenbühel/Dos se la Forca, an Early Mesolithic (Middle Sauveterrian) site, attest an economy based on contemporaneous exploitation of different environments. Together with woodland and alpine fauna, dominated by wild boar, red deer and chamois, the site is remarkable for aquatic resources of the near wetland, the sikte is remarkable for the expolitation of fish, freshwater molluscs, pond turtles and semi-aquatic mammals such as beaver and otter. On the ground of the high frequency of Castor fiber, not only at Galgenbühel around 39 % of the remains but also at the rockshelter Pradestel, we can assume that some hunter-gatherer groups of the area, probably during seasonal exploitation of fish-grounds, have been specialized in beaver hunting, exploited for nutritional purposes and for its pelt.

Beaver (Castor spp.) are considered a riverine or
lacustrine animal, but surveys of tidal channels in the Skagit
Delta (Washington, USA) found beaver dams and lodges in the
tidal shrub zone at densities equal or greater than in non-tidal
rivers. Dams were typically flooded by a meter or more during
high tide, but at low tide they impounded water, allowing
beaver to swim freely while quadrupling pool habitat for fish
compared to channels without dams. Seven fish species were
caught in low-tide pools, including threatened juvenile Chinook
salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), whose densities (by
volume) averaged 3.2 times higher in low-tide pools than
shallows. Accounting for the total contribution of pools and
shallows to juvenile Chinook abundance, beaver pools tripled
shrub zone channel capacity for juvenile Chinook salmon at
low tide relative to herbaceous zone marsh without beaver
pools. Current Chinook recovery efforts focus on restoring
herbaceous zone tidal marsh for rearing juveniles, but this
focus overlooks presently rare and poorly understood habitat,
like tidal shrub marsh, that was historically common and
likely important to beaver and small estuarine or anadromous
fish.

The research of medieval reception of Aristotle ' s knowledge of zoology confirmed that on the way through the Arabic and Latin translation to mediaeval encyclopaedias Aristotle ' s treatises underwent both large and small alterations in both names and descriptions of animals. The mean­ing of these new names often remained unchanged; in other instances, however, medieval authors interpreted their models so incorrectly that they endowed the original animal not only with a new name but also with new features of appearance and patterns of behaviour. In Greek mythology, Lamia, daughter of the king of Libya, bore several children to Zeus, but his jealous wife, Hera, killed all but one of them. Transformed by grief and anger, Lamia became a monster with the manners and physical traits of an animal. The word lamia can also be found in the form of an appellative. In the book of Isaiah in the Vulgate, the lamia is among the animals, beasts and monsters which will despoil Jerusalem when God's judgement befalls the city. Ancient zoological works use the word to indicate what is probably a species of shark, while medieval encyclopedias add several other meanings: lamia denotes, among other things, a hybrid creature which looks like a woman with horse legs; and a four-legged animal which damages plants in gardens at night and is likely to attack people it encounters. The origins of most ancient, early-Christian and medieval conceptions of the lamia have been traced more or less satisfactorily (see the study Hana Šedinová, "La raffigurazione della "lamia" nel "Vocabularius dictus Lactifer" e le sue origini antiche e medievali"); the only tradition which remains unexplained is that of the fierce quadruped which threatens property and people's lives. The purpose of the present Note is to explore the origins of this ferocious creature, to determine what animal or animals may have inspired it, and to map the ways in which it entered medieval culture under the new name of lamia. The answers to these questions are to be found in the medieval reception of Aristotle's zoological observations, through the Arabic and Latin translations of his Historia animalium.