Culture, ecology, and pigs from the 5th to the 3rd millennium BC around the Fertile Crescent

Abstract

By the 5th millennium BC people in the Middle East were dependent for their meat on four domestic ungulates: sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs, all considerably smaller than their wild ancestors (Bökönyi 1977; Uerpmann 1979; Flannery, K.V. 1983; Laffer 1983; Meadow 1983; Stampfli 1983; Grigson 1989; Ducos 1993; Horwitz & Tchernov 1998; Vigne & Buitenhuis 1999; Peters et al. 2000; Ervynck et al. 2001; and many others). It is uncertain whether equids had been domesticated at this date, but their remains are so few in most sites of the 5th, 4th, and 3rd millennia that they can be discounted in any discussion relating to the domestic economy. On the small number of sites where their remains are plentiful they are thought to be derived from wild onagers or wild asses (Uerpmann 1986). In these three millennia the numerical proportion of pig remains compared with those of other domestic artiodactyls varies from site to site. In view of the later pig prohibitions of Islam and Judaism it is of particular interest to know, for the prehistory of the area, when and where pigs were present or absent, and if absent whether this can already be accounted for by any developing social or cultural attitude, in the millennia before the establishment of these religions, or whether it must be explained by simpler economic or environmental factors. All dates in the present work are based on uncalibrated radiocarbon years BC, simply because even when radiocarbon dates for the sites are available (which is by no means always the case), many have not been published in calibrated form. The period studied in the present work starts with the later pottery cultures of the 5th millennium BC which are usually designated as Early Chalcolithic (Late Halaf, Amuq E, and Ubaid 2 and 3) although in the southern Levant most authorities refer to the contemporary Wadi Rabah culture as the Late Neolithic. The 4th millennium is the period of the Chalcolithic (or Late Chalcolithic), typically the Ghassoul-Beersheva culture of the southern Levant and the Uruk and Late Ubaid periods in Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and south-eastern Turkey.