Figure 2.1. Topographic map of Middle East.
The Near East, shown in Figure 2.1, encompasses Southwest Asia and the northeast corner of Africa. The region’s position between Asia, Europe, and Africa has made it one of the globe’s most dynamic mixing pots of peoples for thousands of years. It served as the setting for the first migrations of the genus Homo out of Africa, the first contact between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, the mingling of the earliest farming communities, the development and expansion of the first cities and empires, and the meeting point for traders and warriors coming from China, India, Europe, and Africa. In part because of this cultural diversity and its unique location in the Old World, the Near East is the birthplace of three of the world’s major religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—as well as numerous other faiths, such as Druzism, Yezidism, Bahá’í, and Zoroastrianism. Dozens of languages are spoken representing three major world language families—Semitic (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew), Turkic (Turkish), and Indo-European (Kurdish, Persian)—as well as those unrelated to the world’s major language families, including tongues extant (e.g., Georgian, in the small Kartvelian language family) and extinct (Sumerian).
Figure 2.1. Topographic map of Middle East.
Supporting this diversity of peoples and cultures are a range of environmental zones—deserts, marine coastlines, lacustrine shorelines, oak-pistachio forests, grassland steppes, marshes, and alpine tundra. Rainfall, which is one of the key determinants of these environments, varies sharply. To the south, the Arabian Peninsula is characterized by extreme aridity, with less than 100 mm of rain falling in an average year, giving rise to deserts that end at the mountainous coasts of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.1 (For comparison, Phoenix, Arizona, receives about 200 mm per year.)2 Deserts extend across the Sinai Peninsula and into Egypt, where the Nile traces a thin green line through the sand. The desert continues northward into Syria, where it gradually gives way to semi-arid grasslands and eventually forested foothills, and eastward until the Euphrates River and its lush riparian ecosystems.3
Near the coasts of the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas and approaching the curved arc of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains, rainfall increases to well over 1,000 mm per year, roughly similar to that on the east coast of the United States, although it occurs almost exclusively in the autumn, winter, and spring. Grasslands give way to forests of pine, oak, pistachio, cedar, and olive trees.4 Even before hitting this wetter band, rainfed agriculture becomes possible when precipitation reaches around 300 mm per year, .
The northern and eastern slopes of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains give way to the central Anatolian and Iranian Plateaus, which themselves extend until hitting another set of mountains: the Elburz in northern Iran and the Pontic and Caucasus in Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia.5 These plateaus are more arid than the mountains, and their southern and western foothills are populated by steppic and xeromorphic vegetation. Because ruminating animals readily digest these types of plants, these regions have historically served as rich pasturelands for domestic sheep, goats, and cattle, but not pigs.
Some of the most fertile areas of the region are those without much rainfall—namely southern Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile supported some of the earliest agricultural heartlands. The northern Khabur alluvium in northeastern Syria is another breadbasket region, as are the Jordan and the Amuq Valleys in the Levant. The major rivers and their tributaries, the numerous and often seasonal wadis, attract large numbers of fauna, including wild boar. Wild boar also thrive on agricultural lands, much to the dismay of farmers, and in the forested mountain and foothill regions. They form large communities in marshlands and swamps scattered throughout the rainfed and river-fed water systems of the Near East. In fact, the only places where wild boar are absent are the Nile River Valley, where they were exterminated in the 19th century, and the most arid parts of the regions, such as the interior of the Arabian Peninsula.
Evolutionarily speaking, pigs are among the most successful mammals on the planet, a feat attributed largely to their usefulness as livestock animals. With a population estimated in 2016 at 981 million,6 there is about one domestic pig per 7.5 people. And that’s just the number of live animals that are counted in official statistics. Pork producers have high turnover rates; a single pig can be born, weaned, fattened, and slaughtered in less than 12 months. For that reason, the number of pigs slaughtered for meat each year is often greater than the number counted as livestock at the end of the year. In 2016, for example, about 1.5 billion swine were slaughtered, more than any other animal besides chickens and 50 percent more than the number counted as livestock.7 The geographic spread of swine is just as impressive. Domestic pigs are raised on every continent except Antarctica. Wild boar and feral swine (i.e., wild-living animals descended from domestic pigs) are found throughout the earth’s temperate regions from Australia to North America.
Domestic pigs descended from Eurasian wild boar, or Sus scrofa. The genus Sus is classified in the Suidae, a family that includes such distant relatives as peccaries, which are native to the Americas and which split off from the main branch of Suidae about 34–40 million years ago. Within the past 18 million years, the Old World suids have evolved into a number of different genera with diverse characteristics. In Indonesia, one finds babirusa, or “deer-pigs” (Babyrousa babyrussa), whose upper tusks emerge through the tops of their snouts. Meanwhile, the beagle-sized pygmy hog (Porcula salvania), an endangered species, inhabits eastern India and Bhutan. Other suids, such as warthogs (Phacochoerus sp.), giant forest hogs (Hylochoerus meinertzhageni), and bushpigs (Potamochoerus sp.), are distributed throughout sub-Saharan Africa.8
The genus Sus evolved in Southeast Asia or Island Southeast Asia sometime in the late Miocene, about 10–5.3 million years ago. Several species still inhabit the region extending across Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines: Sus barbatus, S. cebifons, S. celebensis, S. verrucosus, and S. scrofa, the last of which is the only species found wild across Eurasia.9 Today, wild boar are an endemic feature of riverine, forest, lacustrine, and marsh environments from Southeast Asia to Siberia and from Scandinavia to northern Africa. Favored sport animals, wild boar have been exported for hunting to other parts of the world, including the Americas.
Sus scrofa’s success came at the expense of other members of the Sus genus. Prior to the spread of Sus scrofa out of Southeast Asia, another suid, Sus strozzi, had successfully colonized Europe and the Near East. Sus strozzi went extinct one to two million years ago, around the same time that Sus scrofa appeared in the paleontological record. The paleontological record reveals a similar story for Sus minor and Sus peii/xiaozhu, which inhabited China and parts of Europe.10 The reasons that Sus scrofa won out are not known. A likely explanation is that Sus scrofa invaded the habitats of other suids and outcompeted them in ways that are not yet understood. But there is also genetic evidence in modern wild boar suggesting that these ancient suid populations interbred.11 Thus, in addition to outcompeting the other suid populations, Eurasian wild boar may have simply been more prodigious breeders capable of “swallowing” the gene pools of related species. Indeed, such a process appears to be under way today. All species of Sus except Sus scrofa are currently endangered, in part because Sus scrofa have successfully invaded their habitats and hybridized with them.12 In this way, pig history mirrors human history. Just like Sus scrofa—but in a different time and place—anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) colonized parts of Eurasia inhabited by Neanderthals, a species with which ours interbred and ultimately outcompeted.
If their evolutionary history contains parallels with that of humans, the anatomy of swine also bears some resemblance to our own. Both species are omnivores and therefore possess similar organs associated with digestion. We also share a vulnerability to similar gastrointestinal parasites, such as tapeworm (Taenia sp.) and roundworm (Ascaris sp.). Pig teeth, like human teeth, are low-crowned, or bunodont. These anatomical similarities make pigs an ideal animal for biomedical testing.
Swine also possess several obvious anatomical features unlike those of humans. They are hoofed mammals (ungulates) with an even number of digits (artiodactyls). They walk on their two middle toes and are therefore “cloven-hoofed,” a feature that would later become important to the writers of the Torah. Pigs and wild boar have robust skeletons and thick skulls. Males (boars) possess large, continuously growing canines (“tusks”) that present a formidable weapon against predators and other males.
Pigs are intelligent, curious, and social animals, features that scholars have long recognized.13 Swine are exploratory, seeking out environmental novelties and stimulation. They possess brain structures and biochemistry broadly similar to those of humans, and for that reason pigs are occasionally subjects of cognitive studies.14 In the wild, females (sows) form small herds, called “sounders,” of around two to five mature sows and their offspring. In the wild, young males leave the sounder around sexual maturity—usually around one year of age—and will seasonally compete for opportunities to join a sounder and breed with its females.15
Pigs are prodigious breeders, a fact that has made them valuable as livestock. Males and females reach sexual maturity around 1 year of age and can live past 10 years.16 Although wild boar and feral swine typically have only one litter per year, livestock keepers can reliably achieve two litters per year by taking advantage of two key features. First, gestation time is short—about 114 days. Second, sows can become pregnant within 4–6 weeks of giving birth.17 Amplifying the productivity of swine-keeping operation are pigs’ sizable litters. In the wild, sows typically give birth to 4–6 piglets, but this number is considerably higher in domesticated breeds, especially those that have undergone positive selection for larger litter size and higher teat counts.18 Depending on the breed and management style, a sow-boar pair can easily produce 25, 100, or more piglets in their lifetimes. This allows for potentially explosive population growth unmatched by single-birth animals like sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and humans.
Pigs are also differentiated from most of the other domestic animals by their diet. With the exception of pigs, the earliest livestock species in the ancient Near East—sheep, goats, and cattle—were ruminants, which extract calories from high-fiber foods through foregut fermentation. Ruminants’ multichambered stomachs evolved to hold masticated plant matter, which is often regurgitated and chewed a second time, so that microbes can break down cellulose and convert it into nutrients the animal can absorb. Pigs do not have this ability. They cannot subsist on grasses alone but must seek out high-calorie foods like nuts, tubers, fruits, and seeds. Like humans, chickens, and dogs, pigs are omnivores. They eat insects, worms, small mammals, and birds when the opportunity arises.19 Not particularly picky, pigs and wild boar also eat carrion and the feces of other animals, including humans.20 Pigs are also fond of cultivated crops, and wild or feral swine can cause significant damage to crops.21 For example, in 2007, feral pigs cost farmers in the US about $1.5 billion in damages.22
Pigs drink a variable amount of water depending on their age, sex, and health status. Most farmers provide water ad libitum and do not keep tabs on how much is going to their livestock, but agricultural scientists have made these calculations (see Table A.1 in the appendix). In general, 5–20 liters of drinking water per day per pig is typical, with more required at higher ambient temperatures.23 Pigs’ daily drinking water needs are greater than those of sheep or goats but considerably less than those of cattle or horses. However, cattle and horses are more efficient consumers of water per kilogram of body mass. Additionally, to enable proper thermoregulation, pigs must have access to water or mud to wallow in when temperatures rise above 30°C.24
Researchers differ in their definition of the term “domestication” as it applies to animals, each stressing different aspects of this singular form of human-animal relationship.25 At its core, domestication is an evolutionary process by which a population of animals adapts on a genetic level to the unique ecological niche created when a human society attempts to manage that population for the provision of food, companionship, or some other benefit. Managing an animal population means exerting control over the population’s mobility, reproduction, social structure, and/or diet. Thus, management has a direct impact on evolutionary selection pressures.
Most archaeologists agree that management, and the selection pressures it entails, first emerged from one of two situations. Humans may have pursued hunting strategies designed to secure more reliable and predictable sources of meat. Alternatively, humans may have managed animals that had already invaded habitats populated by humans as commensals, perhaps attracted to garbage or safety from predators. Or perhaps a combination of both was in play, as I suggest for the pig. In either case, the domestication of pigs and the other earliest domesticates was not intentional, as early thinkers such as Darwin suspected.26 Rather, by interacting with animals and altering the set of selection pressures on certain populations to maximize their access to meat, people inadvertently selected for new behavioral and physiological traits.27
Selection for the specific traits of domestic animals was a complex process involving feedback between human and animal partners. The processes of domestication were likely unique from context to context. In general, new biological traits probably arose from a combination of the relaxation of selection pressures on wild populations and specific adaptations by animal populations to life among—and exploitation by—humans. For example, one hallmark of domestic animals, variable coat colors, might have persisted in domestic populations simply because camouflage was no longer necessary, while the behavioral traits for which domestic animals are best known (being less afraid of humans or other animals) have helped animals adapt to their roles as livestock. It is important to recognize that traits like these not only developed in response to exploitation by humans, but also facilitated it. Friendlier and more docile animals were easier for humans to manage in larger numbers. These adaptations pushed humans to reconsider their relationships with animals, initiating a revolutionary cultural transformation that flipped the logic of hunting on its head: people shifted from a focus on obtaining meat from dead animals to acquiring and maintaining live ones. The process of domestication thus involved feedback between human and animal partners, as well as between cultural and biological traits, that propelled a continual ratcheting up of human exploitation, animal adaptation, and human adaptation to new opportunities presented by behaviorally and physiologically modified animal populations.
From an evolutionary standpoint, the domestication process proved incredibly successful for animal populations. By living in the “human niche,” animals essentially piggybacked onto the success of human populations.28 But domestic animals are not free-riders. They contribute to the success of human populations by providing reliable and movable sources of food, traction power, and clothing—not to mention companionship. Animals were central to the complex economic systems that emerged in the ancient Near East. Domestication is therefore best thought of as a unique form of symbiosis with vague parallels to other forms of mutualism known to biologists.29
Across species, researchers have noted that many domestic animals share similar traits. This is referred to as the “domestication syndrome,” and the traits associated with it are shown in Figure 2.2. They include floppy ears and tails, variable coat colors, increased fertility, and shorter snouts. They also include smaller teeth and, at least initially, smaller body size. Domestic animals tend to have smaller brains than wild animals. The brains of domestic pigs, for example, are about 35 percent smaller than those of wild boar, with major reductions in those parts of the brain associated with memory and emotional response.30 These changes go hand in hand with behavioral ones: domestic animals tend to be less frightened of humans and other animals, are generally more affable, and exhibit a “decline in environmental awareness”31—a loss of ability to detect and respond to potential environmental hazards and opportunities. These behavioral changes, which are probably the most significant adaptation by domestic animals to the “human niche,” stem from neurochemical alterations that biologists have begun to map out in the genomes of pigs and other animals.32
Figure 2.2. Physiological and behavioral changes in domestic pigs.
Recently, it has been suggested that all, or at least most, of the unique traits of domestic animals reflect initial and continuing selection for tameness. In one famous experiment, the Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev domesticated wild foxes—replicating the suite of physiological traits of the domestication syndrome—by selectively breeding only those individuals that displayed less aggressive/fearful responses to human handlers.33 In light of Belyaev’s experiment, recent work has hypothesized that selection for tameness affected neural crest cells, which are found in fetal animals.34 These cells migrate during maturation of the fetus to a number of locations, including those where hair, tooth, skeletal, and connective tissues develop—locations where we see many of the traits associated with the domestication syndrome. Thus, by selecting for tameness, humans may have unintentionally impacted neural crest cell development and thereby created many of the hallmarks of domestic animals. This theory remains to be tested, but if true, it would provide a grand unifying biological theory of animal domestication. On the other hand, it would not explain the cultural changes that also drove domestication.
The specifics of the process of pig domestication are still unclear. Around 10,000 years ago, certain populations of Homo sapiens and Sus scrofa formed close relationships that probably developed along two lines. First, some wild boar were able to thrive within the environmental niches carved out by increasingly sedentary human communities. In these niches were garbage dumps and, increasingly, fields of cereals and other cultivated plants, some of which were already domesticated or in the process of becoming so. Wild boar would have been attracted to these new sources of food. But as agricultural pests and/or trash heap commensals, wild boar would have needed to tolerate the proximity of humans. This may have created a unique selection pressure for greater tameness among some of them.
Second, and at the same time, some people began to hunt wild boar more intensively. That is, they were relying more heavily on hunted pork than their ancestors had. To enhance their chances of success, hunters targeted younger animals, which were smaller and less aggressive. At some point, people began directly interfering with wild boar populations in order to make pork an even more reliable resource. By allowing mature females to live and instead focusing on juveniles and males, hunters facilitated the growth of the local wild boar populations. Meanwhile, in an effort to expand the range of wild boar populations, people transported wild boar to islands and other new habitats. In doing so, they increased the availability of pork regionally. .
Close contact with humans as commensals and managed game probably began a process of selection for tameness and other genetically controlled traits advantageous to regular interaction with people. While this biological transition was happening, a cultural one was occurring as well. For the humans who increasingly relied on wild boar for meat, a perceptual shift from dead to live animals owned by humans began to take shape; hunters grew less concerned with tracking and killing wild boar than with keeping their swine alive until the appropriate time for slaughter.35 In this way, game management—controlling populations of animals in order to facilitate hunting—became herd management, or animal husbandry, with the intent of keeping and breeding animals as the property of people.36
Yet contact between humans and wild boar did not always lead to domestication. Evidence for close relationships between ancient humans and wild boar in the early Holocene is widespread—for example, in the Near East/eastern Mediterranean,37 Japan,38 northern Europe,39 and Italy.40 But for reasons that are not entirely clear, only in some of these contexts did domestic pigs evolve. Zooarchaeologists and geneticists have established two geographic regions where pigs were, without question, domesticated independently: northern Mesopotamia around 8000 BC and China around 6500 BC.41 Pigs are one of only a few animal species for which we have concrete evidence of independent domestication in two different cultural settings.
From their original centers of domestication, pigs spread to other areas of the world. From the Near East, people brought pigs into Europe and North Africa.42 From China, people brought pigs into Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the Pacific as far as Hawaii.43 In each of these cases, domestic pigs bred—or were bred—with local populations of wild boar. The resulting hybrids (a Latin derivative used to describe the offspring of, in this case, a domestic pig and a wild boar) were often better livestock animals than their parents. This has resulted in a genetic palimpsest reflecting both persistent gene flow between wild and domestic populations as well as a continuous selection for domestic phenotypes.44
In the past 300 years, it is the descendants of the Chinese domestic pigs that have enjoyed the most reproductive success. Beginning in the 18th century, agricultural scientists in Europe realized that Chinese breeds gained weight more rapidly and produced more piglets than European breeds.45 They began importing these pigs to Europe, where they interbred them with local stocks and eventually created the major meat-producing breeds we know today, such as the Large White, Berkshire, and Duroc.
Zooarchaeologists have devoted much research over the past two decades to detecting these instances of pig domestication and spread. Of the traits associated with the domestication syndrome, only a few are imprinted onto bones and other hard tissues and can therefore leave traces in the archaeological record. The reduction in tooth and body size is the major zooarchaeological indicator of pig domestication.46 In recent years, however, researchers have begun to track genetic features, like novel alleles for coat color, through the analysis of ancient DNA.47 Other indicators show changes in the exploitation of suids by humans rather than the biological changes indicative of adaptation. For example, some scientists have tracked the incidence of pathologies on bones and teeth (i.e., osteological signatures of disease, malnutrition, or injury), which reflect the application of novel stresses to domestic animals.48 Others have examined chemical (carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen isotope) signatures of dietary change.49 Still others have reconstructed the demographic profiles of ancient swine populations to document shifts related to human management.50 The cumulative result of all of these examinations is that zooarchaeologists have been able to determine where and when pig domestication occurred. It has also allowed some to explore how pig domestication happened, as we will see in Chapter 3.
I find the diversity of ways that people have raised swine in cultures around the world to be the most fascinating aspect of this animal. The number of unique forms of pig management reflects both human ingenuity and pigs’ incredible ecological and dietary flexibility. Although there are dozens of ways to manage pigs, it is possible to describe two major forms of husbandry: intensive and extensive.
Intensive husbandry provides perhaps the most iconic image of swine management for American and British readers—the backyard sty inhabited by a couple of pigs drowsing, rolling in mud, and awaiting their next meal of kitchen slop. Under these conditions, the animals have less flexibility and independence. Humans dictate their social structure, living spaces, diet, and reproductive partners, if they have any—most males are castrated before puberty. For this level of control to operate effectively, human caretakers must understand their livestock’s needs. Without proper care, intensively managed pigs can suffer from poor diets, epidemic diseases, and even boredom and physiological stress.51
Confining pigs to smaller spaces and controlling their diets has one major advantage: it is an incredibly efficient method of pork production. Intensive husbandry minimizes the loss of animals to predators and it allows for greater control over pigs’ well-being, meaning that fewer piglets die from hypothermia or other preventable causes. Intensive husbandry also decreases the time necessary for pigs to reach slaughter weight because it eliminates the need for swine to search for food, avoid predators, and seek shelter from the elements. Instead, they can direct their consumed calories toward growth and fat accumulation.52 Finally, intensive husbandry enhances herd growth by limiting the time it takes for sows and boars to reach puberty and by decreasing the age at which piglets can be weaned. Sows can become pregnant earlier in life and more frequently give birth to two litters per year.
Modern industrial farms have taken intensive husbandry to an extreme, supplying swine with scientifically tested food regimens, pumping them full of antibiotics to increase weight gain and eliminate the spread of disease, and housing them in facilities that can accommodate hundreds of pigs. This type of production is, as Upton Sinclair described it in The Jungle, “porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics.” Although large-scale pig operations existed in the ancient past,53 modern factory farms have their roots in the Industrial Revolution and were designed to meet the demands of burgeoning urban populations working long hours for capitalist enterprises.54
Efficient, factory-style production rarely takes pigs’ well-being into consideration. However, recent legislation in the US has focused on gestation crates (or farrowing crates), which are metal cages designed to prevent a sow from rolling over on her piglets.55 Critics contend that long-term confinement in gestation crates is torture; hog producers argue that it keeps pork prices low on supermarket shelves. This ongoing debate between animal rights activists and major pork producers grabbed headlines in 2014 when New Jersey governor Chris Christie vetoed a bill designed to eliminate gestation crates in the state.56 Readers and voters alike must weigh in on the ethics of modern meat production, something from which most consumers are alienated. As for the pigs, although they have evolved from their wild boar ancestors to sustain higher levels of stress, industrial-scale production pushes them beyond their “limits of endurance.”57 There can be no denying that cheap pork comes at the price of pigs’ welfare.
Extensive husbandry allows pigs greater freedom to search for food and develop social structures. One finds some of the most extensive forms of pig husbandry on New Guinea, an island remarkable for its incredible diversity of pig husbandry practices,58 as well as in parts of the Mediterranean, such as Greece, Sardinia, and Corsica.59 In some New Guinea communities, villagers (usually the men) own pigs that are allowed complete freedom to wander around villages or into the bush. These pigs have almost total control over what they eat, where they go, where they sleep, and with whom they mate. If their caretakers (usually the women) impose any restrictions on pigs’ behavior, it is often limited to fencing them out of certain areas (e.g., vegetable gardens) or applying hobbles to encumber their movements.60 Similarly, in parts of the Mediterranean, free-range pig owners limit their animals’ potentially destructive eating habits by inserting a ring into their snouts; the ring administers a small shock of pain when the pig roots in the ground.61 In both cases, these free-ranging pigs’ contact with humans occurs primarily during infancy and development, on their trips to their owners for supplemental food, and at slaughter.
Extensive husbandry takes advantage of otherwise unused resources, especially in forested environments, and requires little labor investment. There are, however, some substantial downsides. Litter sizes tend to be smaller and females reach puberty later than under intensive management. Additionally, the number of piglets lost to predators and hypothermia is higher.62 There are also social risks. Free-ranging pigs may wander onto another person’s property and cause damage. Pigs may be poached or stolen, which can lead to quarrels between neighbors or even violence. The infamous 19th century feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys is one example of swine-inspired strife. In New Guinea, some of the most common causes of inter-village hostilities are thefts of free-living pigs and crop damage by roving swine.63
One way to avoid some of the social conflicts is to enlist a swineherd, a professional trained to care for pigs, protect them from predators and poachers, and direct them toward feeding places that won’t cause damage to farmland. But a drove of pigs is not as easy to control as a herd of sheep. A single swineherd can manage only a few dozen pigs at a time and usually over short distances, although there are ethnographic examples of pigs being driven over longer distances—sometimes as much as 100 km.64 With some coordination, extensive husbandry can be made into a large-scale endeavor. Every autumn in medieval England, swineherds turned out thousands of swine to fatten on the nuts produced by hardwood forests, a system known as pannage.65 Even today, swineherding remains a major form of pig production in Spain and Portugal,66 Sardinia and Corsica,67 and Greece.68 Readers who have indulged in jamón ibérico, the meat of Black Iberian pigs fattened on acorns, know just how fruitful extensive husbandry can be.
A form of extensive husbandry is settlement scavenging, or free-ranging within human settlements, especially larger towns and cities. Similar to the sty-raised pigs owned by the Zabaleen of Cairo, pigs raised under this form of husbandry remove waste and recycle it into pork. For example, in modern-day Calcutta and Agra in India,
[h]alf wild and half domesticated [pigs] move from open-air dumps to piles of refuse, snuffling around among rotten vegetable peelings, sheep bones, decomposing fruit and similar garbage, wallowing and snorting in the open drainage channels of towns and villages, rummaging unhesitatingly amidst the excrement and mud of the sewers in search of some titbit. They manage to eke out a fairly good living, judging by the size of the vast majority of these beasts.69
Pigs served similar trash-disposal roles in other cities, such as 19th century New York. In fact, much like Cairo in 2009, Manhattan was the stage of a major showdown between pig owners and the state in the 1850s—a dramatic series of events described in contemporary newspapers as the “Piggery Wars.”70 As many residents of New York complained at the time, free-ranging pigs can spread disease, damage property, and injure pets, small children, and the elderly. Nevertheless, the practice of allowing pigs to fend for themselves in human settlements persists to this day in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, among other places.71
Building on the general information about pigs provided in this chapter, the rest of this book will examine how pigs interacted with humans in the Near East. Much has been written about this topic. Categorizing and comparing this research is a complicated endeavor because of the diversity of scholarly approaches and the tendency of these approaches to talk past one another. As a guiding framework, I turn to the “pig principles” laid out two decades ago by zooarchaeologists Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish.72 While some have exaggerated the importance of these “principles,” they nevertheless have had a major impact on the Near Eastern pig literature and thus provide a useful starting point.
1. Because of their need for water and shade, pigs are less adapted to arid environments than ruminants, especially sheep and goats.73
2. Deforestation can make certain forms of extensive pig husbandry less viable.74
3. Because it is cheap and does not require access to pasture, pig husbandry is often more prevalent among lower socioeconomic classes.75
4. Pigs are not as mobile as sheep, goats, cattle, equids, and camels. For that reason, nomadic pastoralists do not (often) raise pigs.
5. Pigs reproduce quickly and a large herd can be produced from a few “starter” animals. Pigs are thus ideal animals to accompany humans in the initial settlement of a territory.
6. Pigs carry diseases that can be transmitted to humans, especially tapeworm and trichinosis.
7. In contrast to ruminants, pigs have dietary needs similar to those of humans and therefore can be said, in an ecological sense, to compete with humans for resources.76
8. Because the pig—a nonruminating and omnivorous hoofed mammal—is unique among the animals of the Near East, some people may have found it symbolically ambiguous and therefore dangerous.77
9. Because pigs reproduce quickly and litter sizes vary, it is difficult for centralized institutions to tax or regulate them.78
10. Pigs do not provide “secondary products” like wool or dairy, which can be stored and traded over long distances. This makes pig production an unattractive undertaking for elites and their institutions.
11. Because of principles 9 and 10, pigs may be less common in urban centers than rural hinterlands.79 On the other hand, because pigs adapt so well to urban environments, they are often more common in cities than in rural areas.
I argue that no single pig principle can adequately explain the history of this animal or the development of the pig taboo, despite scholars’ frequent attempts to do so. Instead, in the chapters to come, I will show how some of these principles, as well as a few other factors, helped shape swine’s historical trajectory at specific moments in time. In addition, I will trace Near Eastern cultural attitudes toward pigs beginning almost 2 million years ago and ending with the present day.
I rely on several types of data. None of them is perfect. Iconographic data show the contexts and ways in which people depicted pigs. However, they are notoriously difficult to interpret, especially in the absence of historical texts attesting to their significance. Ancient texts provide another body of evidence. Writing first developed around 3000 BC. The texts recovered from archaeological sites and, in some cases, passed on to modern readers through copying over the millennia shed light on the ways in which pigs figured into economic and ritual activities. However, these documents were primarily written by and for the elite. They offer an incomplete and biased perspective on ancient cultures.
The vast majority of the information in this book derives from published zooarchaeological data. While animal bone data do not come with the interpretive baggage that accompanies texts and iconographic images, other problems affect them. Issues include differential deposition, preservation, and recovery—that is, biases concerning how and where bones get into the archaeological record, which ones survive intact to the present-day, and which ones archaeologists ultimately recover and study. This is particularly problematic when one compares material from different contexts. This book includes data spread across different time periods from many sites. The sites themselves were excavated by archaeologists who possessed varying levels of scientific interest in collecting and studying animal remains. Evaluating patterns in such diverse faunal assemblages often feels like comparing apples to oranges to dates to bananas.
I have tried to overcome these issues by avoiding problematic comparisons. One way of minimizing biases is to situate zooarchaeological data within their specific temporal contexts. I have also tried to be careful about the tabulation of animal taxa, as the size and composition of bones can influence preservation and recovery. I rely heavily on the ratios of pig remains to those of other animal species. For the most part, I calculate these proportions as percentages of pigs relative to medium and large mammals—that is, animals that reach about 10 kg as adults (about the size of a fit beagle). Over time, four species came to dominate this category: domestic sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs, although domestic dogs and equids also made variable, but typically small contributions. For that reason, beginning in Chapter 5, I switch from discussing the relative abundance of pig remains compared with other medium and large mammal bones to the proportion of pigs as a percentage of the combined total of the four main domestic livestock species.
Finally, I have attempted to include debates about the data and the claims made. While no dataset is perfect and no analysis free from error or bias, I hope that scholars and general readers find in the following pages a balanced perspective that draws on multiple viewpoints and sufficiently contextualizes the information and its problems.