A 2,000-year-old lap dog in Lincolnshire may be an early pet

About 2,000 years ago, someone in what is now Lincolnshire looked after a very small dog. Archaeologists have now found its near-complete skeleton, and experts say it may be one of the earliest lap dogs known in Britain, kept for company instead of work.

A find on the Viking Link route

Wessex Archaeology made the discovery near Partney, close to Spilsby, while working along the route of the Viking Link electricity interconnector. The project runs for about 475 miles, from Sandilands in the north to Bicker in the south. Archaeologists investigated around 50 sites along the way, which gave them a rare cross-section of Lincolnshire’s past from the Mesolithic onward.

Among that wider work, the team has also reported 32 Anglo-Saxon graves. The small dog, though, drew special attention.

A dog the size of a young Maltese

The skeleton is near-complete, and the animal was tiny, about the size of a young Maltese. Radiocarbon dating places it between roughly 40 BC and AD 60, a span that covers the Late Iron Age and the early Romano-British period.

Lorrain Higbee, principal zooarchaeologist at Wessex Archaeology, called it a very unusual find in a rural setting of this date. She said it shows that people in Britain were keeping dogs for companionship rather than just as working animals.

Why a tiny dog tells a human story

Most dogs from this period in Britain were larger animals that herded, guarded or hunted. A dog this small would not have been much use for those jobs. According to the report, it was a house pet that would not have survived without human care. That makes the skeleton a quiet record of affection: someone fed it, protected it and kept it alive.

It also hints at how ideas about animals were changing. Contact with the wider Roman world may have helped bring small companion dogs to Britain, though the report does not say how this one arrived, and that link is only a possibility.

What we cannot say yet

Several questions stay open. We do not know the dog’s name, its owner or whether it came from a rich household. Experts call it one of the earliest lap dogs, not the first, and future finds could change that. The details so far come from news reports based on Wessex Archaeology’s work, and a full scientific write-up may add more.

Still, a small skeleton from a rural field is a reminder that people loved their pets long before we had a word for it.

Sources

• Wessex Archaeology announcement (original release not located; the project page is Viking Link Interconnector archaeological work)
• Lincolnshire World: Archaeologists digging in Lincolnshire unearth very unusual skeletal remains