Swine, Kine, and Caprine: Divergent Political Economic and Ideological Trajectories of Mesopotamian Livestock

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Livestock are widely recognized as fundamental features of the political economies of ancient Near Eastern states. Animals served as “wealth on the hoof,” the strategic resources of urban institutions seeking to expand aspects of the subsistence economic to finance their activities and power. However, in the Mesopotamian world, different species played different roles in the emergence and evolution of urban states and the political economies that supported them. Why is it, for example, that sheep, goats, and cattle loomed large in the textual and artistic record of Mesopotamian institutions, while pigs were relatively rare? Why were pigs such a popular source of food and household magic? Focusing on the fourth and third millennia BC in southern and northern Mesopotamia, I examine how caprines, cattle, and pigs were mobilized (in both an economic and ideological sense) in different sectors (smallholder/communal vs. institutional) of the political economy of early cities in Mesopotamia. I argue that the affordances of different animals—their bodily and behavioral features that, within certain cultural and environmental contexts, promote particular types of engagements with human—launched cattle, pigs, and caprines onto these unique trajectories.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32442