Evolution of a Taboo

Around 7000 BC, people in northern Syria and Iran began to make ceramic vessels and use them for cooking, storage, and the presentation of food.⁵ This development marked the beginning of the Late Neolithic. Pottery allowed people to decorate utilitarian objects with stylistic motifs on an incredible scale, imbuing ceramics with creative elements by painting, incising, and molding them into different shapes. Many of these styles persisted over long periods of time, enabling archaeologists to reconstruct a number of ceramic traditions. Some, like the Halaf (5900–5200 BC) in northern Mesopotamia, were spread over a large area. Others, like the Yarmukian (6400–5800 BC) in the southern Levant, were regionally circumscribed.

Archaeologists refer to groups that display differences in heritable social status and specialization as “complex societies.” Like agriculture, complex societies would spread and in a few millennia define the political landscape of the Near East. By the early 4th millennium BC, cities and states began to appear in Mesopotamia.⁸ By around 3600 BC, the world’s first colonial system, known as the “Uruk Expansion,” integrated parts of the Fertile Crescent into an economic sphere centered in southern Mesopotamia.⁹

The development of complex societies was aided by changes in agricultural practice in the Near East. People domesticated new crops—olives and grapes—and adopted domestic donkeys from Africa as pack animals.¹⁰ Additionally, cereal production intensified as people applied more labor in order to extract more calories, even though it meant lower marginal returns.¹¹ This included the adoption of techniques designed to enhance productivity, such as adding manure to the soil.¹²

For animals, the “secondary products revolution”¹³ was a key turning point. A “secondary product” is a resource that one can extract from an animal without killing it.¹⁴ Examples of secondary products include milk and wool, but also traction power—the use of animals for pulling carts and plowing fields—which greatly amplified the ability to produce and transport large amounts of grain. People had used secondary products since the Neolithic,¹⁵ but beginning in the Chalcolithic, communities began to change how they managed animals in an effort to maximize the output of these valuable and transportable goods.¹⁶ This economic development, as we will see, engendered a shift in the perception of animals no less revolutionary than the Pre-Pottery Neolithic reimagining of prey as livestock.

The (Delayed) Adoption of Pig Husbandry in the Near East

The spread of animal husbandry across the Near East was a piecemeal process. Domestic sheep and goat husbandry spread relatively quickly, reaching western Anatolia, Crete, the Levant, and southwestern Iran by around 7000 BC.¹⁷ Domestic sheep and goats appeared in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th millennium BC¹⁸ and in Lower Egypt in the 6th millennium BC.¹⁹ However, the spread of cattle and especially pig husbandry was a much slower process, despite the fact that these animals were fundamental features of the agricultural economy in northern Mesopotamia in the PPNB and Late Neolithic.²⁰

The spread of domestic pigs was not only slow, but also uneven. For example, domestic pigs appeared in the southern Levant by the early 7th millennium BC,²¹ but not in central Anatolia until the 5th millennium BC—3,000 years after domestic sheep and goats and 2,000 years after cattle.²² Though the delay was less severe in other regions, pigs still did not appear for centuries after sheep, goats, and often cattle. Domestic pigs first appeared in northwest Anatolia, by 5800 BC—about 700 years after sheep, goats, and cattle.²³ They were not introduced to central and southern Mesopotamia until the 6th millennium BC²⁴ and were not in Iran until the 5th millennium.²⁵ In Egypt, pigs arrived only once people began practicing cereal agriculture, something they resisted until the 5th millennium BC—again, centuries after sheep, goats, and cattle.²⁶

The reasons for the slow spread of domestic pig husbandry are not entirely clear. One possibility is that sheep, goats, and, to a lesser extent, cattle are more mobile than pigs. The ruminants can be herded over long distances and eat grass along the way. Sheep and especially goats fare better in arid environments. The vast tracts of arid grasslands and deserts of the Near East may therefore have presented a barrier to the spread of domestic pigs. Indeed, once people had adopted pig husbandry, the relative importance of pork mapped onto well-watered environments: pigs represent 20–50 percent of medium and large mammal remains from Neolithic sites in the marshlands of the Nile Delta and southern Mesopotamia.²⁷ The same is true for the Levant, where pig husbandry flourished in the oak-covered hills of the Galilee, the Hula Valley, and the Jordan River Valley.²⁸ But in the arid grasslands and dry plateaus, the landscapes that define central Anatolia, Iran, eastern Jordan, and the Syrian steppe, people kept very few or even no pigs.²⁹

The First European Pigs

Unlike the situation in the Near East, the spread of agriculture into Europe involved all the animals of the Neolithic package at once. Sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs arrived more or less contemporaneously throughout Europe between about 7000 BC and 5500 BC.³¹ There are a number of potential reasons that pig husbandry was adopted more readily. First, the environment of Europe is significantly wetter and more temperate than that of much of the Near East. There were few places in Europe in which pig husbandry could not flourish. Second, the spread of agriculture into Europe was closely tied to the diffusion of people.³² Rather than local hunter-gatherers adopting farming, picking and choosing from the Neolithic package, in Europe it was pioneering farmers, originally from the Near East, that brought the agricultural way of life.

Research on ancient suid DNA has shed more light on the spread of pigs into Europe. Mitochondrial DNA (reflecting maternal ancestry) and nuclear DNA (reflecting both maternal and paternal ancestry) extracted from pig bones from Neolithic sites indicate that the first domestic pigs in Europe descended from Near Eastern pigs. Their ancestors were the livestock that the pioneering farmers brought with them into the new continent. But beginning in the 4th millennium BC, DNA extracted from domestic pigs matched that of European wild boar.³³ In other words, there was a genetic turnover in which Near Eastern-derived genes were replaced by European-derived ones. Today, none of the major domestic pig breeds in Europe contain any detectable Near Eastern ancestry.³⁴

The likely explanation for this genetic turnover is that there was frequent hybridization between local wild boar in Europe and domestic pigs. There is good evidence that early European stockbreeders routinely captured wild boar or otherwise allowed them to breed with their pigs.³⁵ Hybridization was part of a successful husbandry strategy that, whether the herders were aware of it or not, eliminated the deleterious effects of inbreeding and ensured long-term reproductive success.³⁶ However, it is not clear why European pig genes were more successful over the long term. Because the genetic turnover was so widespread (even extending into the Near East, as we will see in Chapter 7) genes found in European wild boar must have conferred some type of advantage to swine living under pig husbandry systems. We can speculate what these were—slightly higher fecundity, larger body size, tolerance to cold weather, to name a few. But we won’t know the cause of the genetic turnover until future research documents which phenotypes underlay the success of European-derived lineages.

New Approaches in the Late Neolithic

Back in the Near East, major changes in agricultural production were afoot in the Late Neolithic (7000–5000 BC).³⁷ Farmers made innovations to adapt to new challenges, such as those posed by the “8.2 ka event,” an episode of global cooling that brought arid conditions to the Near East.³⁸ People also improved upon existing farming techniques in order to generate surpluses. In terms of animals, Late Neolithic peoples in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia began to exploit animal secondary products.³⁹ They also began to intensify pig husbandry.

Penning Pigs

Zooarchaeological data from Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites like Çayönü indicate that pigs were raised in an extensive manner during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Pig owners kept their animals under a loose form of management, allowing them considerable freedom to wander in search of food for much of the year. By the Late Neolithic, this situation began to change. People in northern Mesopotamia began confining pigs more permanently to pens.

Evidence for this shift to intensive pig husbandry is fourfold. First, there was a sudden decrease in pig size, especially the size of teeth. At Çayönü, the initial domestication of pigs caused a subtle and minor decrease in skeletal and dental measurements. In the final phase of the Neolithic occupation, the pigs at Çayönü were only about 5–10 percent smaller than their wild boar ancestors after more than 2,000 years of game management and husbandry. But metrical data from several 6th millennium sites indicate that pig teeth were almost 20 percent smaller than the teeth of wild boar.⁴⁰ This is symptomatic of a rapid decrease in facial size, something likely related both to more intensive selection for tameness and to reproductive isolation from wild boar. Penning explains both processes. As Figure 4.1 shows, this process of progressive size diminution would continue over the next several millennia, probably as a result of increasingly intensive husbandry regimes.⁴¹

Figure 4.1. Steady and continual reduction in the size of pigs. This figure was drawn with log-size index values, using average modern wild boar as a standard.

Second, pig teeth displayed a higher number of hypoplasias. Penning would be expected to increase hypoplasias either by contributing to a higher incidence of disease or by providing an environment in which sick or malnourished individuals (e.g., runts) could receive better care.⁴² Third, examination of microscopic plant remains embedded in pigs’ dental calculus, or “tartar,” at the 6th millennium BC site of Domuztepe in southern Turkey revealed a diet that included processed and cooked cereal grains (Table 4.1). The results suggest that pigs were eating kitchen scraps, a feeding practice common in intensive husbandry systems.⁴³

Table 4.1 Plant Microfossil Remains (Starch Granules and Phytoliths) Recovered from Pig Dental Calculus

Archaeological Site	Dates Occupied	Plant Remains Identified
Hallan Çemi	9700–9300 BC, PPNA	Tubers Unidentified grasses
Domuztepe	5900–5400 BC, Late Neolithic	Acorns Oats (processed and cooked) Barley (processed) Unidentified cooked starches Unidentified grasses
Tell Ziyadeh	5000–4200 BC, Chalcolithic (Ubaid)	Oat (?)
Hacinebi Tepe	4100–3300 BC, Chalcolithic	Barley (processed?) Unidentified grasses (cereal chaff)
Tell al-Raqa’i	2900–2600 BC, Early Bronze Age	Oat (processed) Unidentified grasses
Tell Leilan	2600–2100 BC, Early Bronze Age	Unidentified grasses

Source: After Weber and Price 2016.

The most direct evidence for intensive pig husbandry derives from a spectacular find at the site of Mezraa-Teleilat in southern Turkey. In a structure labeled Building AY, excavators found the burnt remains of five pigs ranging in age from one month to two years old.⁴⁴ Building AY was a house dating to the latter half of the 7th millennium BC, and the excavators concluded that the building had burned down in an accidental fire. We can deduce what happened from the contextual evidence and the ages of the animals. A family’s herd of pigs, living with their human caretakers, had become trapped inside the house when it went up in flames.⁴⁵ Perhaps a few escaped, but the ones that didn’t have provided us with the first clear evidence of pigs penned within a domestic structure in a Late Neolithic village.

Feasting on Pork

The use of pigs for feasts finds many parallels around the world. American readers are probably all familiar with the centrality of pork to barbecues, especially in the cuisine of the US South. Pork is also a traditional food for Christmas feasts throughout the Western world; for example, the fattening and slaughter schedules for traditional swineherds in Spain in part revolve around the Christmastime spike in demand.⁴⁹ In the anthropological literature, pig feasts and the politics that surround them are prominent in ethnographies of peoples in New Guinea and the South Pacific.⁵⁰

Feasts, recall from Chapter 3, are celebrations that inspire a sense of community and togetherness through the sharing of food. They can help mend social tensions. Feasts also offer backdrops to political dramas, offering ambitious individuals the opportunity to position themselves as providers to the people and to justify their authority.⁵¹ However, in the fiercely egalitarian Late Neolithic societies, feasts and other rituals may well have served to suppress the ambitions of elites. Regular feasts may have been ritualized and enforced means by which villagers shared food and other resources.⁵²

Pigs in Other Rituals

Beyond feasting, we find occasional, if mysterious, uses of pigs in other types of rituals. Many of these rituals involved pig crania and tusks, perhaps related to the masculine associations attached to boar. For example, at ‘Ain Ghazal in Jordan in the middle to late 7th millennium BC, skulls and other pig bones were buried alongside humans, and one burial contained a pendant made of out a pig tusk.⁵³ Similarly, at Domuztepe, excavators found a pig skull buried alongside that of a human,⁵⁴ while at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, an unusual wild boar skull was recovered from a late 7th millennium BC deposit. This skull had been modified—the upper jaw had been removed and some of its lower teeth knocked out, perhaps to transform it into a headdress or a wall decoration.⁵⁵ Pig crania were even occasional subjects of art: at the 6th millennium BC site of Choga Mami in Iraq, excavators recovered a finely crafted terracotta pig head from the remains of a house.⁵⁶ The meanings of these rituals are obscure, as indeed is the seeming focus on pigs’ heads. But they highlight the fact that pigs served more than just an economic role; they were important for the ritual life of Late Neolithic communities.

Pigs in the Chalcolithic: The Great Transformation

The emergence of complex societies in the 5th and 4th millennia BC upended traditional egalitarian values, enforced new economic concepts such as (family-based) private property, and cast individuals into specific social roles. Food played an important part in this process. For one thing, certain food procurement activities took on new meanings. Although hunting was no longer a major means of subsistence in most of the Near East, it became an activity symbolically important for the elite, not only as a form of recreation, but also as an allegory for their power.⁵⁷ Beginning in the 4th millennium, Mesopotamian kings commissioned images of themselves hunting to symbolize their masculinity, strength, and dominance over nature. While lions and bulls were the main animals displayed, wild boar were also portrayed. Figure 4.2 shows cylinder seals recovered from late 4th millennium Uruk in southern Iraq and Susa in Iran. The seals depict these cities’ rulers hunting wild boar.⁵⁸

Figure 4.2. 4th millennium BC cylinder seal impressions containing scenes of wild boar hunting.

Feasting was another way that food was mobilized during the transition to complex societies. The transition to complex societies required the breakdown of mechanisms that had limited social inequality. Emerging elites thus co-opted the feasts that had once served to promote equality.⁵⁹ By casting themselves as providers for the people and as instruments of social cohesion, elites found in feasts a way to justify their existence and authority,⁶⁰ even as they increasingly used their power to appropriate surplus from the peasantry in the form of taxes, tithes, rents, or involuntary contributions.⁶¹ Feeding the masses, or claiming to do so, was and would remain an important justification of power in the ancient Near East.⁶² But feasting served another important role: to create a distinction between the upper classes and the hoi polloi.⁶³ Large-scale celebrations intended only for the entertainment of aristocrats represented a radical new use of food beginning in the Chalcolithic.

Interestingly, pork began to play a less prominent role in feasts in the Near East. With some exceptions, most of the feasting deposits identified from 5th and 4th millennia BC sites contain few or even no pig bones.⁶⁴ Chalcolithic feasts focused instead on sheep, goats, and cattle, even when the settlements at which these feasts took place raised pigs in abundance.

One explanation for the diminished presence of pork in Chalcolithic feasts is that pigs became tied up with emerging class identities. That is, people may have begun to associate pigs with lower social classes or with quotidian as opposed to ritual activities. Zooarchaeological data from the site of Arslantepe in Anatolia supports this hypothesis. At Arslantepe, pig bones were concentrated in nonelite household garbage deposits. In contrast, sheep, goat, and cattle bones were found in all contexts, but they were especially abundant in temples, where they represented sacrificial offerings and/or animals slaughtered for feasts⁶⁵—sacrificial animals were frequently feasted upon in the ancient world.⁶⁶ Pigs were largely absent from these ritual deposits, representing about 1 percent of the medium and large mammal bones. Pig remains were also more abundant in nonelite households (23 percent) than in elite residences (14 percent).

Figure 4.3. Proto-Elamite vessel of a pig. Southwestern Iran, ca. 3100–2900 BC.

The Arslantepe data seem to suggest a downgrading of the status of pork to that of a food eaten more frequently by the lower classes in nonritual settings. But pigs’ absence from ritual contexts might have been due not so much to the development of negative attitudes toward pork as to the elevation of the status of mutton and beef. If pigs had developed a negative connotation, we would expect their complete absence from ritual settings. That’s not the case; they simply played a minor role. Similarly, elites continued to eat pork, but they ate it less frequently than they did the meat of ruminants. I argue that this reflects a developing association between ruminants and wealth.

A new ruminant economy emerged, but the impacts of the secondary products revolution extended beyond livestock keeping, strictly speaking. In particular, grain production received a major boost from cattle traction.⁶⁷ Attached to a plow, a pair of oxen could increase the amount of land brought under cultivation about tenfold.⁶⁸ Deep plowing, moreover, brought nutrient-rich soils to the surface, enriching the output of fields. Cattle could also be used in threshing and for hauling sheaves of wheat, helping to overcome production bottlenecks. Although the idea to use cattle for these purposes may have occurred to people in the Neolithic, there is only extensive evidence for plowing in the Chalcolithic and later periods.⁶⁹ One reason for this is that keeping a pair of oxen alive year-round required a substantial investment in feed and maintenance. That may not have been possible on a large scale until the Chalcolithic. For the same reason, beginning in the Chalcolithic, ownership of oxen probably began to define the differences between the haves and have-nots.⁷⁰

Wool and goat hair represented another set of important commodities in the ancient Near East, ones that later would serve as the main trade exports from Mesopotamia.⁷¹ Instead of slaughtering most males as juveniles to ensure herd growth and propagation, herders waited until these animals were four or five years old to maximize the amount of fiber they could obtain from them. Such strategies came with downsides; herds composed of a high ratio of adult males to females grow at a slower rate and are a less efficient means of achieving subsistence needs. In order to make intensive fiber exploitation an attractive pursuit, herds may have had to be quite large in the first place, something that would benefit from elite-directed coordination and managerial oversight. For that reason, small-scale subsistence-based pastoralists tended to shy away from such a strategy. But elite owners of large herds, pastoralists integrated into market economies, or herders sponsored by an elite patron were better positioned to assume those risks.⁷²

As a result of the secondary products revolution, pastoral ruminants—sheep, goats, and cattle—became factors in the development of economic inequality and specialization.⁷³ Their products became commodities whose exchange financed the elite takeover of agriculture and craft production. Ruminants thus became sources of wealth. But in addition to being the means of production, ruminants also represented wealth in themselves. Controlling herds, and propagating them like the financial assets they were, gave elites another building block with which to construct their power. Although pigs could serve other purposes, such as removing waste from settlements or producing nitrogen-rich manure to fertilize fields, swine were raised primarily for one reason—pork. Their lack of a commodifiable secondary product excluded them as sources of wealth, a point we will take up in the next chapter. .

The faunal data in parts of the Near East bear out the impact of the secondary products revolution on pig husbandry. In Mesopotamia in the latter half of the 4^th millennium BC, pigs became less common in faunal assemblages as sheep and goats began to dominate. At some sites, pigs were almost or completely absent, especially those associated with the Uruk Expansion in Mesopotamia, Iran, and Anatolia.⁷⁴ The decline in pork consumption even occurred in areas where pig husbandry had been—and would again be—a major agricultural activity, such as the marshes of southern Mesopotamia and the Khabur drainage in northern Syria.⁷⁵

Nevertheless, pork remained an important source of food for many people across the Near East. Pig bones typically account for at least 25 percent of medium and large mammals remains—which at this point consist almost entirely of domestic livestock—at Chalcolithic sites in the hilly regions of the southern Levant and the Jordan River Valley,⁷⁶ north and central Anatolia,⁷⁷ and parts of northern Mesopotamia.⁷⁸ In the Nile Delta, pigs made up around 50 percent of the medium and large mammal bones.⁷⁹

To sum up, in the Late Neolithic, farming spread across the Near East. However, people were more hesitant about adopting pig husbandry than other forms of animal husbandry. In places where pig husbandry was adopted, there seems to have been considerable interbreeding with local wild boar. In Europe, local wild boar genes, once introduced into domestic pig populations, were passed on to successive generations and ultimately succeeded over Near Eastern derived genes.