More than 2,000 years ago, the inhabitants of a settlement in what is now eastern England did something that might seem totally unremarkable: They put a chicken in a pot. What’s notable is that they did not cook or eat the chicken. Archaeologists who later unearthed the site in Lincolnshire County found the chicken’s skeleton intact and concluded that it had been carefully buried by its Iron Age handlers, perhaps as an offering to the gods, or perhaps because it was seen as godlike itself.