by Chris Fowler
Major domesticated animals in the European Neolithic were treated and used in a distinctively different manner, implying their different categorization. As argued by Ellen (1979), any classification is constituted within certain social conditions and can be situational or structural. The former refers to the specific not-yet-fixed social context in which classifications are in the process of formation; the latter to stabilized social and economic relations. At another level, different animals, through their position in the classification scheme, conceptually framed and constituted different parts of the landscapes they inhabited. This created an association between different species and certain parts of the landscape in the form of a relationship between place, memory, and identity (Jones 1998; Jones and Richards 2003, 49). According to Jones (1998, 303), animals provided ‘a medium by which places may be linked through social and symbolic practice’. Thus categories of animals may refer to other categories, such as categories of place.
TRACKING ANIMAL BIOGRAPHIES
By virtue of their biological lives, histories of ownership, exchange, death/slaughter, sometimes consumption, and eventual deposition, animals and their remains hold intricate biographies. In this respect they are different only by degree, if at all, from people. Many animal life-stories were probably of little consequence, and both disposal practices and taphonomic processes have removed their presence from the archaeological record (traces may, of course, be indirect, such as lipids in ceramics or rare preserved footprints: Roberts et al. 1996). Engagements with wild species offered little opportunity for the generation of specific biographies, but with domestication came the capacity to track the lives of certain animals in detail. By virtue of their special status and imbrication in human social worlds, the biographies of some animals were undoubtedly consciously cultivated and remembered by their human custodians.
To judge from the special treatment afforded them through careful deposition and even formal burial, cattle often featured highly in Neolithic social worlds. In the early and middle Neolithic of central and north-western Europe the lives of cattle perhaps mattered more than their contribution to the diet of local inhabitants suggests (Bogucki 1988, 1993; Ray and Thomas 2003). They may have achieved this position long before domestication altered their anatomy, as documented in the Near Eastern Neolithic. Numerically dominating many faunal assemblages, cattle were an important source of mobile and inheritable wealth, of dairy products, traction and, on special occasions, of meat, probably due to qualities such as their size, strength, vitality, and mobility (Whittle et al. 1999, 385). This special treatment afforded to cattle is widely discernible across Europe and the Near East (e.g. Akkermans and Schwartz 2003, 75; Edmonds 1999, 28). Probably the best example comes from Çatalhöyük (Mellaart 1967; Hodder 1990), with bucrania placed on building walls and bull’s motifs in the form of horned benches and pillars (Fig. 39.1). Cattle are also social animals, whilst the equivalent gestation period for cattle and humans surely reinforced a sense of affinity. According to Ray and Thomas (2003), cattle were a form of inalienable wealth, used in gift exchanges, as bridewealth, in procuring alliances, or in settling death payments, with slaughter and consumption only on selected occasions (notably funerals: Parker Pearson 2000). Their enchainment within a range of social practices developed connections between cattle and kinship networks, herds becoming living histories of kinship links, exchanges, genealogies, and lines of descent: cattle effectively became ‘congealed lumps of social relations’ (Ray and Thomas 2003, 41). Mapping these relations and the composition of herds will become increasingly possible with the application of aDNA and stable isotope analysis. Already, there is preliminary evidence that some animals slaughtered and deposited at enclosure and ceremonial sites of the fourth and third millennium BC on the Wessex chalk of southern England had been herded from different, distant geologies to the west (Hege Usborne and Mike Parker Pearson, pers. comm.).
FIG. 39.1. Cattle bucrania built into the walls of a house at Çatalhöyük, Turkey.
(Photograph: J. Pollard)
Pig is also a symbolically and socially important animal in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. This is well reported in the Chinese Neolithic where pig was ritually important and used to display individual wealth, status, and inequality, as well as playing a key role in diet (Kim 1994, 120). Its significance then decreased, reaching a low in the Iron Age (Hesse and Wapnish 1998, 126). Pigs provide plenty of meat and can be raised quickly and in numbers, making them ideal feasting animals compared to cattle, which can take up to four years to reach optimal weight (Bogucki 1993) and so are reserved for special sacrifice. The symbolic importance of sheep and goats is less evident. They were usually not taboo, but used for different sacrifices.
The Neolithic also brought changing relations with wild animals. Red deer remained the dominant animal symbol for indigenous foragers in northern Europe. In the course of the Neolithic, the distinction we make between animals classified as ‘domesticated’ or ‘wild’ starts to dissolve. Though never domesticated, herds of deer were probably managed through selective culling and seemingly deliberately introduced to Orkney, Ireland, and other regions during the Neolithic (Sharples 2000; Woodman et al. 1997). In terms of size substitution, cattle probably replaced red deer (Whittle 2003, 91), though their behaviours are quite different (Clutton-Brock 1999). Partially butchered red deer carcases placed on the margins of late Neolithic settlements on Orkney may say much about prohibitions on consumption resulting from their ambiguous classificatory status (Sharples 2000, 114). Earlier in the Orcadian Neolithic, in the complex of chambered cairns on the island of Rousay, cattle and disarticulated human skeletons were placed in tombs on the lower slopes, red deer and human skulls in those on higher parts of the landscape (Jones 1998). Arguably, cattle and humans form some kind of indissoluble collective, whilst the human spirit, epitomized by the skull, is associated with the ambiguous status of wild red deer (Whittle 2003).
ANIMALS AND SOCIAL IDENTITY
Economic transformations during the Neolithic are the result of a complex set of social and ideological factors, and human–animal relations and their significant changes over time cannot be reduced solely to the role of animals in subsistence economies. We must recognize the part animals played in the formation and maintenance of communal and individual identity. This involved animals’ mythic dimension and ever-presence as natural symbols, as well as the part they played in routine activities, fertility, and in forming social bonds and alliances. Whether in the context of myth or routine practice, animals provided an important medium for expressing social identity.
Animals, myths, and identity
Myths provided key narrative media through which the order of the world could be explained and legitimated, and animals undoubtedly took their place within these. The case for totemic systems of social organization deriving from or supporting origin myths during the Neolithic is weak, but these have been proposed, for instance, for animal bone from Orcadian tombs (Fraser 1983). More likely myths provided a source of didactic stories, explanations for distant events, and complex metaphors illustrating kinship patterns and people’s relationships with the environment.
The position of various animal species in earliest Neolithic mythologies in the Balkans and Atlantic coast has been explored by Whittle (1998, 2000). He argues that the part-human, part-fish carvings on boulders within the seventh-millennium BC Iron Gates settlement of Lepenski Vir evoked deities or ancestral beings embodied in Danube beluga. The central mythic/symbolic role of these fish at this time might mark a response to the introduction of domesticated sheep/goats and the potentially destabilizing emergence of Neolithic lifestyles (Whittle 1998, 2003, 103). Similarly, mediation between new ways of living and thinking of at the time of transition is argued for Mané Rutual-type motifs on coastal Breton menhirs of the earlier fifth millennium BC, interpreted as representations of whales—an important component of local late Mesolithic myths and relations with the sea (Whittle 2000). The combination of
representations of a sheep/goat and cow alongside a hafted axe and whale motif on the Table des Marchand/Gavrinis menhir may define an attempt to link an existing world order with the potent novelty of Neolithic materialities and practices. However such representations are interpreted, their very presence highlights how instrumental thinking about and engaging with animals was during the transition process.
Animals, routines, and identity
Routine engagement with various animal species would have helped constitute personal and group identity, either through the avoidance of ‘unclean’ or symbolically ‘dangerous’ animals as part of food taboos (Douglas 1966, Parker Pearson 2003), or through the performance of roles such as shepherding and cattle herding, where people took their identity from the animals over which they held care and responsibility. In certain regions (i.e. central and south-eastern Europe) the occupation of new territories by early farmers was accompanied by the construction of their communal identity and descent, whilst maintaining security in a new ‘frontier’ situation and unknown environment and in the conditions of social fragmentation, as evidenced by highly dispersed occupation areas. Domesticated animals, especially cattle, were arguably important social and symbolic resources in these situations, providing metaphors for group formation and communal identity. This was particularly important in the case of the LBK. Social uses of animals, mainly cattle and possibly pigs, were part of inherited tradition, brought into being in everyday practice through material objects such as houses or monuments. Cattle, often used in feasts (see below) probably also signified ties and stressed relations with living and previous generations. Whatever the precise situation, keeping livestock may result in new status differences between households and groups, new patterns of wealth transfer, and new gender inequalities (Tilley 1996, 659–662). By way of anthropological illustration, among contemporary African groups, Holden and Mace (2003) have demonstrated a correspondence between the acquisition of cattle herds and a shift from matrilineal to patrilineal or mixed descent. The need to protect herds promotes patriliny, whilst cattle as a form of inheritable wealth benefit sons more than daughters because of their role in bridewealth payments.
At a local level, animal preference could mark cultural or intra-group identity, as illustrated for a variety of settlement contexts with marked patterning in the occurrence and distribution of the bones of different species. At the LBK site of Cuiry-lès-Chaudardes in the Aisne valley, northern France, such patterning in deposition was retained throughout the settlement’s life (Hachem 2000, Whittle 2003, 73–75). More bones of wild animals were found in pits flanking small buildings than large; wild boar was more abundant in the northern part of the site, sheep in the western, and cattle in the eastern. This has been taken to suggest intra-settlement specialization—hunters, herders, and shepherds associated with different buildings—though, as Whittle (2003, 74) points out, it may also reflect age-/gender-grade residence, or communal versus routine consumption of different species. Much later, in the thirty-fourth century BC, the short-lived lake-shore settlement of Arbon-Bleiche 3, Switzerland, shows a similar level of spatial patterning (Marti-Grädel et al. 2004). Here, pig and dog bones and those of coregonid fish were more prevalent in the southern half of the site, cattle in the north. This patterning is not a product of taphonomic factors, nor does it reflect hierarchical differences in the quality of meat or the finds and architecture of the settlement. Marti-Grädel et al. (2004, 175) suggest the patterning is linked to moiety membership, perhaps based on descent, with each lineage observing particular dietary rules.
In other contexts, hunting served to reinforce identity distinctions. At the late Neolithic (Herpály) tell and flat settlement at Polgár-Csőszhalom on the Hungarian Plain, this might relate to status. Here hunted species such as aurochs and wild boar are much more frequent on the presumably ‘elevated’ status tell, whilst domesticates such as sheep and goat dominate the faunal assemblage from the flat site (data from Schwartz in Bartosiewicz 2005, fig. 6.5; see Raczky, this volume). In northern and north-western Europe, remains of hunted animals in Cerny and TRB (Trichterbecherkultur) graves point to identity formations that had more to do with a sense of ancestry than hierarchy (Midgley 2005, 125; Tresset and Vigne 2007, 202). Bangles made of wild boar tusks, necklaces of red deer canines, carnivore claws, and bird-of-prey talons were placed within Cerny graves, though contemporary enclosures and settlements show an economy relying on cattle. Tresset and Vigne (2007, 202) note how similar these grave assemblages are to late Mesolithic graves on the Breton coast, and how markedly different to earlier LBK grave goods. The teeth and claws of wild and powerful animals may here have served to send the soul or ancestral spirit to another domain in which encounters with wild animals were part of the exchange of vitality and life-force that often characterizes hunter-gatherer world views (Århem 1996).
Ceremonial consumption and identity
The social significance of animals in the Neolithic is well manifested by food-related practices, particularly feasting and ceremonial consumption. These might have integrated and differentiated local communities, contributing to both preserving and altering their social structure. In the early Neolithic, these practices are usually associated with the domestic domain, in the middle and late Neolithic with funerary contexts and ancestral traditions. Feasts can be marked by the consumption of large quantities of often unusual foods, their modes of preparation and discard, and the settings where they occurred. Large animals, especially domesticates such as cattle, were commonly valued more than smaller stock. This is discernible archaeologically by a deliberate deposition of selected anatomical parts, including skulls, in special locations. Many of these remains were probably buried following the act of conspicuous slaughter, butchering, and eating. A range of animals were involved in this kind of consumption, from cattle through pigs to sheep.
Slaughtering cattle in the early Neolithic was embedded in rich social and symbolic connotations linked to the communal sharing of meat. It was certainly an appropriate resource in feasting and provided food used during ceremonial practices. Bones of aurochs indicative of feasting were deposited in large loam pits alongside LBK longhouses, as reported from Kujavia in the North European plain. The consumption of roasted cattle marrow appears as a common and quite peculiar culinary practice. Feasting was clearly regarded as appropriate in one social context and inappropriate in another, as indicated by the deliberate deposition of the resulting bones in specific settlement locales, in particular in the open space between longhouses, in the so-called loam pits. Such deposits do not appear in other types of pits (Marciniak 2005). Their presence in loam pits, used to extract raw material for longhouse construction, may suggest that feasting was linked with house-building. This resembles practices known from the Near Eastern Neolithic.
Ritual consumption and feasting in the middle and late Neolithic is associated with deliberate depositions of animal remains in funerary and ceremonial settings. These practices are an element of the emergence of complex symbolism associated with funerary rites (Dietler 1996, 103–104) and reported in numerous contexts, from TRB burial sites such as Podgaj 7A and Krusza Podlotowa 2 in Poland (Marciniak 2008), to north-central and north-west European causewayed enclosures and longbarrows (Andersen 1997; Edmonds 1999; Whittle et al. 1999), and British henge monuments (Albarella and Serjeantson 2002; Parker Pearson et al. 2007). At causewayed enclosures, cattle were perhaps deposited as gifts during funerary ceremonies and linked with the emergence of social bonds between participating individuals and groups (Edmonds 1999, 28). The number of bones deposited in these locations was sometimes huge, representing hundreds of animals. They were often deposited along with human remains, as at Menneville in the Aisne Valley, where three cattle bucrania commemorated the locations of earlier burials, themselves accompanied by cattle and caprovine bones (Hachem et al. 1998). The large scale of these continuously performed practices, their deliberate character, and public location highlight the centrality of animals
in Neolithic ritual and ceremonial practices. Large-scale feasting at these locales is indicative of their role as important ceremonial and exchange centres (Dietler 1996, 105; Thomas 1991, 7–28). An association between cattle, feasting, and funerals is also reported in the latest Neolithic and early Bronze Age, albeit in a considerably transformed manner. The deposition of cattle bones, including skulls, in single graves and round barrows might be linked with social rivalry between groups. The success of the group was apparently measured by the number of deposited objects and possibly the number of cattle for ritual and ceremonial consumption (Hodder 1999, 38; Parker Pearson 2000).
ANIMALS AND SOCIAL LIFE: CONCLUDING COMMENTS
Animal domestication brought new notions of human–animal relations marking a shift to acquisition and control. It enabled the management of animals’ reproductive and productive potential. In terms of their economic exploitation, primary products, comprising those which can be extracted only once in the lifetime of the animal, upon its death, were believed to characterize animal use in the early Neolithic. Sherratt’s influential model of a ‘secondary products revolution’ saw a later (third-millennium BC) diversified exploitation of animals for their secondary products and applications that can be used many times through the course of their lifetime, such as milk, wool, and textile, and as providers of traction power or transport (Sherratt 1981, 1983).