Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck & Peter Rowley-Conwy (ed.). Pigs and Humans: 10,000 years of interaction.

Piper, Philip J.

UMBERTO ALBARELLA, KEITH DOBNEY, ANTON ERVYNCK & PETER ROWLEY-CONWY (ed.). Pigs and Humans: 10,000 years of interaction, xxx+454 pages, 154 illustrations, 44 tables. 2007. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-920704-6 hardback 85 [pounds sterling].

This book is the result of an international workshop held in September 2003 that brought together specialists from around the world to discuss the complex issues of the archaeology of pigs and people. It contains 20 papers covering a diverse range of topics, sub-divided into chapters dealing with evolution and taxonomy, the history of pig domestication and husbandry, methodological approaches, ethnographic studies and pigs in ritual and art. The studies are global, with ethnographic and archaeological re search presented from Europe to the Middle East, East Asia and Melanesia.

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Colin Groves leads the way with a review of pig taxonomy in his familiar witty style. Whether the morphometric differences in Eurasian Sus scrofa populations are really sufficient to differentiate at the sub-species level or just reflect intra-specific variation across a wide geographic range is a matter of debate. But at least Groves has discarded some unhelpful taxonomic names once applied to feral and domestic Sus scrofa populations inhabiting islands such as New Guinea.

From the introduction onwards, the editors emphasise the problem of even defining pig domestication, let alone trying to identify what constitutes early transitions from hunting and management to true domestication. This is particularly pertinent in Japan, where Hongo et al. eloquently outline how during the Middle Jomon period people's perceptions and relationships with pigs change, and find expression in pig burials and suid iconography. Yet, no form of domestication can be discerned until the succeeding Yayoi period, leaving us still wondering what actually caused the changes in people's relationships with pigs during the Middle Jomon period.

Most of the zooarchaeological studies employ similar biometric and aging techniques of analysis in an attempt to differentiate domestic from wild pig populations, so much so, that the methods seem almost standardised. Davidowitz & Horwitz however suggest caution in simply attributing size change to the introduction of managed or domesticated pig populations. They use wild suid craniometric data from Israel to demonstrate that there can be marked variations in wild pig populations across geographic ranges. So, to add another level of analytical evidence, a strong emphasis is placed on the technique of identifying growth defects in the enamel of the developing molar teeth known as Linear Enamel Hypoplasia (LEH). It is suggested that LEH defects can be related to specific periods of stress during a pig's growth and development, and that stresses in the early life of domestic pigs leave them with greater evidence for LEH in the developing teeth than wild pigs. Although, on the whole, this looks like a relatively robust analytical method, there are numerous causes of stress in the natural world that could severely effect the growth of wild pig populations. Certainly a combination of different analytical methods, as many of the authors in this volume have done, is the only convincing way to tackle the problems of identifying pig management, domestication and farrowing practices.

Larson et al. apply mtDNA to address the issues of pig domestication across the globe. In addition to showing that there have been multiple independent domestication events, they have found that the story has been further complicated by unexpected translocations prior to the regional introduction of domestic pig populations. For example, on the island of Flores, Timor, Halmahera and the Mollucas in eastern Indonesia the first pig translocations were from Sulawesi around 7000 years ago, presumably to increase resource availability on these impoverished archipelago islands (though other reasons for pig translocations are possible). Only later, between 3000 and 4000 years ago, did domestic pigs arrive with a range of other wild species including porcupines, civet cats and long-tailed macaques--a process of real-world terra-forming if you like.

Nowhere in the world is the pig of greater importance than East, Southeast Asia and Australasia. For many people pigs are not only an essential meat resource, they are also a symbol of fortune or power. In more recent rimes this has manifested itself in the ritualisation of pig husbandry, the retention of pig mandibles as hunting trophies and their placement in burials. Some of the intimacies between pigs and people in the region are dealt with in the two excellent ethnographic studies from Papua New Guinea; yet we still know almost nothing about the antiquity of these complex relationships across this vast region of the world. This is not a criticism of this important contribution to the repertoire of zooarchaeological studies, but a simple demonstration of what we still don't know.

PHILIP J. PIPER

Archaeological Studies Program, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, Philippines

(Email: Phil_piper2003@yahoo.ie)