Die Entwicklung der Schweinehaltung und ihres Tabus in der südlichen Levante der Spätantike: Ein kombinierter Ansatz aus Archäozoologie, Isotopenforschung und Genetik
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
The main purpose of this project is to explore the husbandry practices that made the expansion of pork production possible in the Greek and Roman period in the southern Levant. To that end, we devised a multimethod approach for studying pig husbandry, using a combination of zooarchaeological, geometric morphometrics, stable isotopes, and aDNA techniques. Work on this project has been severely limited over the past two and a half years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the difficulties associated with travel. We were not able to complete as much as we had hoped. An additional disappointment was that one of our analytical techniques, aDNA, failed to produce any results. Nevertheless, preliminary isotopic, zooarchaeological, and geometric morphometrics data show several interesting patterns. The first is that there appear to have been multiple populations (cf. ‘breeds’) of pigs in the Levant in the Roman period. This is an exciting find as it indicates a degree of sophistication in animal husbandry techniques, and is well situated within the dawning understanding by archaeologists that the agricultural economy Roman Empire, which is only partially understood through textual evidence, was quite complex. The second interesting finding was the broad homogeneity in carbon isotopic patterns over the course of the Iron Age through Byzantine period. Nitrogen isotopes, however, varied more. This might suggest different feeding/husbandry regimes, such as penning/grain-feeding vs. herding. These isotopic patterns seem to line up with kill-off profiles, although that dataset is not yet developed enough at this time. Finally, numerous and recurring pathological lesions on teeth and jaws in pigs sheds light on the often poor health of these animals. While the etiology of this disorder is not understood at this time, and ancient animal diseases remain poorly understood in general, the pattern is an important one for understanding the nature of Roman pig husbandry in the Levant region.
