What the pig ate: A microbotanical study of pig dental calculus from 10th–3rd millennium BC northern Mesopotamia

Abstract

One of the main questions that zooarchaeologists have attempted to answer in their studies of ancient agropastoral economies relates to animal diet. Starch granules and phytoliths, which derive from the plant foods consumed over the course of an animal's life, become imbedded in dental calculus and thus offer direct clues about diet. In this paper, we investigate pig diet with an eye toward understanding husbandry strategies in northern Mesopotamia, the region in which pigs were first domesticated, from the Epipaleolithic though the Early Bronze Age. Our data reveal that pigs consumed an assortment of plant foods, including grasses, wild tubers, acorns, and domestic cereals. Although poor preservation plagued the identification of plant microremains at Epipaleolithic (10 th millennium cal. BC) Hallan Çemi, the identification of a diet based on tubers and grasses matches models of wild boar diet. Pigs at 6 th millennium Domuztepe, 5 th millennium Ziyadeh, and 4 th millennium Hacinebi consumed cereals, particularly oats (Avena sp.) and barley (Hordeum sp.), as well as wild plant food resources. Several of the cereal starch granules showed evidence of cooking, indicating that pigs had access to household refuse beginning at least in the late Neolithic. Moreover, calculus from morphologically wild specimens also contained cooked cereal grains. This points to a close relationship between wild boar populations and human settlements in the Neolithic and beyond. Preservation was poor for 3 rd millennium sites in the study, including Atij, Raqa'i, Ziyadeh, and Leilan, but the available data suggest that pigs ate oats, barley and other Triticeae (the tribe that includes wheat, barley, and goatgrass), and other grasses. This may represent foddering practices in the Early Bronze Age.

The Origins and Evolution of Pig Domestication in Italy: A regional and diachronic study of husbandry practices

“…Similarly, the evidence for the diet of domestic pigs at this site suggested that they were kept close to the settlement, although the authors stated that it is not possible to say if they were allowed to forage or kept in pens (Weber & Price, 2016). Hence, this short study showed the value that alternative methods have in contributing to the question of pig domestication.…”

“…Finally, Weber and Price (2016) presented an interesting study on pigs from a different perspective, focusing on dental calculus of zooarchaeological remains from 10 th to 3 rd millennium BC sites in the Fertile Crescent, including data from sites such as Hallam Çemi (10 th millennium BC) and Domuztepe (6 th millennium BC). Plant microremains were obtained from Sus's tooth calculus, which allowed the authors to reconstruct their ancient diets.…”

Rural Agricultural Economies and Military Provisioning at Roman Gordion (Central Turkey)

“…Further isotopic and microbotanical work (cf. Frémondeau et al 2017;Fuller et al 2012;Weber and Price 2016) is necessary to test the hypothesis of a radical change in pig husbandry, from herding to sty-keeping. Biometric, and potential genetic, analysis will allow the identification of new breeds of domestic animals that may have been introduced, as observed in other parts of the Roman world (MacKinnon 2001(MacKinnon , 2010Ottoni et al 2013).…”

Diversity in pig husbandry from the Classical-Hellenistic to the Byzantine periods: An integrated dental analysis of Düzen Tepe and Sagalassos assemblages (Turkey)

“…Such new methods include dental microwear (Clavel and Sicard 2007;Ward and Mainland 1999;Wilkie et al 2007), linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) analysis (Clavel and Sicard 2007;Dobney and Ervynck 2000;Wang et al 2012;Teegen 2013), stable isotope analysis (e.g. Ervynck et al 2007;Guiry et al 2012;Hamilton et al 2009;Hammond and O'Connor 2013;Minagawa et al 2005;Zavodny et al 2014), geometric morphometrics (GMM; Cucchi et al 2011;Duval et al 2015;Evin 2015) and the analysis of dental calculus (Weber and Price 2015). So far, a limited number of sites have been subject to a combination of several of these approaches (e.g.…”