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* Received March 2009, updated December 2011
CHAPTER 39
ANIMALS AND SOCIAL RELATIONS*
ARKADIUSZ MARCINIAK AND JOSHUA POLLARD
INTRODUCTION
THOUGH achieved through varied mechanisms and with varied material, social, and ideological outcomes, the advent of the Neolithic across Europe brought with it the creation of new worlds (Whittle 1996). Animals, both domesticated and wild, were an ever-present and central part of those social worlds and the effect of their considerable presence should not be underestimated. The control and care of certain species (principally cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats) was now exercised as an integral part of the process of making a living. Behind the zoological role call lay an intricate perceptive knowledge of the environment, folk taxonomies, and rules and routines that structured encounter and engagement with the ‘animal estate’. Whilst traditionally archaeological studies focused on understanding animals in terms of their place within subsistence practices, diet, and strategies of environmental adaptation, there is developing awareness of the social, ontological, symbolic, and cosmological status of animals during the period (e.g. Tilley 1996, 62–66; Jones 1998; Whittle 2003, chapter 4; Marciniak 2005; Pollard 2006).
The position of animals within Neolithic social worlds was likely greater than that of other components of the non-human environment such as plants, though the latter carried their own values (Fairbairn 2000). This elevated status derived from their position as sentient beings sharing many of the ontological qualities of people—comparable life-cycles and behavioural traits in some cases, affection, the display of dominance hierarchies, and differing
degrees of sociality—whilst at the same time retaining clear biological and behavioural differences. Animals were woven into the fabric of social life through their ubiquitous presence and involvement in creating and maintaining social relations via their deployment as a medium of exchange, and in sacrifice and feasting. Through different kinds of engagement, they also contributed to the construction of personhood and identity (Fowler 2004). Above all, people’s relationships with animals are elegantly surmised by Morris (2000, 20) as ‘complex, intimate, reciprocal, personal and crucially ambivalent’.
With such a generalizing framework in mind, this article explores aspects of the social and ontological relations between people and animals during the Neolithic, particularly cosmologies and folk classifications, and the place of animals in social relations and identity formation. Throughout, we emphasize the recursive character of these relationships, aiming to understand how the presence, qualities, materialities, and networks of animal life shaped human socialities as much as human agency created engagement with the ‘animal estate’. It is impossible here to cover the full complexity of human–animal relations across the full geographic and chronological span of the European Neolithic; therefore we focus on the regions corresponding most closely with the authors’ specialist knowledge, namely northern and north-western Europe.
DOMESTICATED AND NON-DOMESTICATED ANIMALS IN THE EUROPEAN NEOLITHIC
The emergence of Neolithic lifestyles was closely associated with new skills and technologies, with animal husbandry arguably one of the most crucial. Neither sheep nor goats had wild ancestors in temperate Europe (Glass 1991, 30), aDNA evidence pointing to their initial domestication, along with that of cattle and pig, in the Neolithic of the northern Near East (Bollongino and Burger 2007; Tresset and Vigne 2007). Despite the presence of wild cattle and pig across most regions, evidence of localized, indigenous domestication of ungulates in Europe is not strong. However, the possibility still exists, whilst interbreeding between domesticated cattle and aurochs can be detected in some regions (e.g. Götherström et al. 2005; Bollongino et al. 2006).
The introduction of domesticated cattle, pig, sheep, and goats is seen as marking a partial or wholesale shift from hunting as the principal mode of engagement with animals. The picture is in fact highly varied (Jarman 1972; Boyle 2006; Tresset and Vigne 2007). Whilst in the early Neolithic of Greece hunting was much reduced, among later western Impressed and Cardial Ware groups the culling of deer and wild boar retained an important role (Tresset and Vigne 2007, 194–196). A range of wild animals such as red deer, aurochs, badger, hare, and fish are very common in the early Neolithic (Körös culture) in the Carpathian Basin, whilst the role of hunting varied considerably across the different areas of the LBK (Linearbandkeramik, or Linear Band Pottery culture). The number of wild animals in faunal assemblages generally appears to decline in the fifth and fourth millennia BC, wild animal remains being represented by antlers, teeth, and tusks mainly in mortuary contexts. However, wild fauna make up in excess of 40% of middle to later Neolithic assemblages from sites in south-west France, north-east Spain, southern Scandinavia, and the lower Rhine (Midgley 1992, 369–372; Boyle 2006). In fact, within any one region or cultural group there can exist considerable inter-site variation in the representation of different wild and domestic species, as shown by data from southern Scandinavian Pitted Ware and TRB (Trichterbecherkultur, or Funnel Beaker culture) contexts (Midgley 1992, 369–372), northern France, and southern England (Tresset and Vigne 2007).
Hunter-gatherer modes of thought can persist beyond the transition to farming, and it is perfectly possible for communities and individuals to hold different, highly context-dependent modes of thinking about the world (Barnard 2007). Where notions of metamorphosis and the immanency of sacred agencies exist, certain species of wild animal might be consciously avoided by farming communities, and their killing and consumption become matters of taboo, because they are perceived to be the embodiment of ancestors or other spirits; an equivalent to ideas of spirit presence in animals often held by hunter-gatherers. This may explain the near total disengagement with species such as brown bear, wolf, cat, and fox, as evidenced by the extreme scarcity of their remains, during the early Neolithic of southern Britain (Pollard 2004, 2006). Where hunting continues, this may even become more ritualized and hold a sacramental dimension (Morris 2000, 23), an observation evidenced by the careful and evidently respectful burial of hunted aurochs in the final Neolithic–early Bronze Age of north-western Europe (Cotton et al. 2006).
INTERPRETING THE EVIDENCE
Faunal remains from Neolithic settlement sites deliver valuable insights into various fields of discourse in which animals were involved. These comprise, in particular, social immersion of human–animal relations, food acquisition, preparation, and consumption, and refuse disposal practices. The character of faunal assemblages at Neolithic sites is shaped by a potentially complex set of cultural and natural processes, with the majority of assemblages formed as a result of continuous long-term accumulation originating from varied sets of activities and often creating a palimpsest. The other category of faunal data comprises debris of single episodes such as feasting or so-called ‘structured’ deposition.
The study of faunal assemblages is the investigation of the life history of an animal, including its complex relations to humans, food-related activities, and, finally, disposal of remains. Paradoxically, the latter could have had the greatest impact on archaeologically recovered patterns (cf. Parker Pearson 2000). Hence, the social interpretation of faunal assemblages is only possible after details of their depositional and post-depositional history are revealed and quantified. More particularly, this investigation involves a detailed evaluation of a complex set of cultural and natural processes shaping the observed distribution of faunal data in particular archaeological contexts. Its first step comprises an examination of the assemblage’s taphonomic history to estimate the degree of modification due to food-related practices and natural causes. This can be supplemented by a study of density-driven attrition. Common practice then involves an examination of species composition, sex and age profiles, and body part representation across distinct contexts such as pits, spaces, and houses across the site. The last step comprises a detailed study of the distribution of faunal remains in relation to other categories of archaeological data such as pottery, chipped stone, and botanical remains, as well as their distribution in distinct features. Recent developments involve lipid analyses, which reveal fatty acids indicative of animal fats stored or cooked in pottery vessels (cf. Copley et al. 2003; Craig et al. 2005). Their results are, however, not straightforward when vessels had multiple uses including the heating of milk products, cooking, or meat or marrow extraction.
CLASSIFICATION AND FOLK TAXONOMIES
The diversity of living organisms is overwhelming. Humans impose order on this complicated organic world by the practice of classification, which defines and distinguishes groups or categories of organisms sharing certain similarities according to an established set of criteria, and then assigns the individual object to one such category. These are later arranged into a larger classificatory scheme in the course of the practice known as taxonomy. Any taxonomic system needs to be composed of distinctive, mutually exclusive, and unambiguous categories arranged in a hierarchical manner in the form of a tree structure. An important example is Carl Linnaeus’ classification of animals and plants in the eighteenth century AD that marked the beginning of modern zoological nomenclature. Linnaeus proposed a hierarchical system in which each organism belongs to a series of ranked taxonomic categories such as species, genus, family, order, class, division, and kingdom. He introduced the so-called binomial nomenclature system whereby each species is referred to by a two-word name in Latin, consisting of the generic name followed by the specific name.
This is only one of many taxonomies, however. Folk taxonomies vary to different degrees from the Linnaean system and Neolithic animal categorizations were p
robably closer to folk taxonomies than to the scientific ones. According to the ethnoscience school of folk taxonomy, the animal world is grouped into five categories: (a) unique beginner, i.e. something akin to the kingdom in biology, usually with no label; (b) a life form, i.e. an inclusive group of organisms delimited by general morphological similarity, such as size, behaviour, or habitat (e.g. fish, bird, or mammal); (c) generic form, i.e. groupings of organisms in the natural environment, comprising the most common category; (d) an intermediate form delimited on the basis of habitat and/or morphology, with less specific criteria than at the generic level, and (e) a varietal form designating categories of significant cultural importance (Berlin et al. 1973).
Contrary to modern zoological systems, folk taxonomies are usually polynomic in nature, i.e. they delimit paraphyletic taxa defined upon shared primitive characteristics, as opposed to a monophyletic taxon, often defined by one or more uniquely shared characteristics. For example, the Fore group from the East New Guinea Highlands developed an exhaustive system of classification consisting of two levels. The first comprises a higher category called ‘big names’ which is further subdivided into lower units called ‘small names’. Among ‘big names’, the Fore list diverse and conspicuous animals of little economic significance including both smaller, such as rodents and marsupials, and large flightless creatures, such as echidna and giant rats. The ‘small names’ comprise usually economically important animals (Diamond 1966).
Early farmers’ actions were certainly conditioned, at least partly, by their way of knowing, understanding, and conceptualizing their world, including domesticated animals. This was probably very idiosyncratic and inevitably far distanced from the scheme of modern biology. Accordingly, paraphrasing John Berger (1980, 5) one can argue that animals in the Neolithic ‘were subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed’. Possibly the best example of the significance classification schemes can impose on the treatment of various animals is found in the Bible. Based on degree of holiness, it explicitly distinguished inedible and untouchable animals from those fit for consumption and sacrifice. The herds of clean animals such as cattle, sheep, and goats were blessed by God and thus part of the divine order. Special importance is given to the lamb, a sacrificial animal par excellence. In contrast, animals such as pigs were avoided because, not being cloven-hoofed and ruminants, they failed to conform to necessary criteria of cleanliness, leading to their avoidance and food prohibition (cf. Douglas 1966).