Pig Management in Neolithic North China: Foddering and Social Change in the Western Liao River Valley

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent models for pig domestication in China have suggested that initial domestication was contingent upon millet cultivation, which allowed for foddering through agricultural surplus. For this study, a combination of bulk collagen carbon and nitrogen isotopic analysis and compound specific carbon isotopic analysis are used to infer the extent to which pigs consumed domestic food products in the form of millet and/or household refuse at two key Neolithic sites in Northern China: Xinglonggou and Xinglongwa. Additionally, by sampling pig remains based on both age and sex, food provisioning directed at certain cohorts within the herd can be identified and associated with ethnographically described management strategies. Ethnographic work on pig management--notably from New Guinea--has illustrated that identifying feeding regimes can be useful to distinguishing between intensive and extensive management strategies as well as community involvement in larger social networks and institutions at a regional level. In the context of the origins of agriculture in the Chinese Neolithic, this paper addresses two major lines of research: (1) when and in what context did foddering emerge; and (2) how changes in pig management practices reflect changes in social and economic organization seen during the transition to the Bronze Age.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26218