2019

Pigs into Dragons & Humans into Farmers: Studying Pigs, People, and Millet in Neolithic North China

In 2014 The Economist dubbed China “The Empire of the Pig”. By that year, nearly one half of all the planet’s pork was consumed and produced in the PRC, but pigs are more than just centerpieces of the Chinese diet—although who but the vegetarians among us can resist a plate of buttery pork belly?—and it’s upon those tasty trotters that empires even in the very deep past may have been built and sustained.

Figure 1: Two centers of pig domestication

China’s history with the domestic pig begins with the animal’s origin. The pig (Sus scrofa) is the only mammalian domestic animal known to have been domesticated independently more than once. This means that unrelated populations of prehistoric people were able to figure out how to manage local wild boars independently from others who were doing the same, and over time—through thousands of years of human selection—these animals became the pink skinned porkers we are used to seeing on our dinner plates today. For pigs, this process happened at least twice: once by 10,000 years ago in southwestern Anatolia—the northern flanks of the region known as the “Fertile Crescent”—and again in north China a couple thousand years later around 8,000 years ago (Fig. 1).

Figure 2: Hongshan Zhulong from the Xinglonggou site in Inner Mongolia. Photo courtesy Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

In China, pigs are central to our understanding of the origins of domestication and agriculture because—except for dogs—they are China’s earliest domestic animal and the ONLY mammal domesticated endemically by prehistoric Chinese people. In contrast to the early farmers of the Fertile Crescent who raised pigs along with sheep, goats, and cattle—for thousands of years in the Neolithic, pigs represented the only domestic animal incorporated into the diets, economies, and worldviews of Chinese people. The exaltation of the pig can be seen precisely in this early period, with the depiction of pigs into some of the earliest jades of the Neolithic Hongshan culture of northern China, which have been dubbed 猪龙Zhulong or “pig-dragons” because of their similarity to both beasts. Such jades appear and become more frequent contemporary with highly ritualized use of pigs in burial and sacrificial contexts in this region and may represent proto-dragons (Fig. 2). Just as the wild boar was transformed into domestic swine, it would seem pigs were also being transformed into dragons.

So, from their very origin as an animal of the home in China, pigs have been used for more than their meat. In Mao’s China pigs were famously known as “fertilizer factories on four legs” and campaigns to encourage raising pigs for their ability to turn household waste into valuable manure for increasing crop yields were initiated. The use of pigs as household recyclers is depicted as early as the Han Dynasty, where emperors and other high-status individuals deemed it necessary to include miniature models of of “pig latrines” in their tombs to be brought with them into the afterlife (Fig. 3).        

Functionally, these pig latrines served the dual purpose of providing hygienic disposal of human household and bodily waste as well as providing manure for crops needed to feed the large populations the Chinese empire already supported. Humans would consume the crops produced, then crop by-products (husks, chaff, etc.) were fed as fodder to livestock (including pigs) and pigs were supplemented by household table scraps (composed of the same crops) along with human excrement, pig feces were then processed and converted into nitrogen and nutrient rich fertilizer that would be used on the crops. 

 Fig. 3: Terracotta “pig latrine”. Han Dynasty.

A sow was more valuable to a household alive than dead, because she aided in sustaining and improving crop yields and so kept a family (or empire) fed. We should remember, that meat as a food source was limited only to the very wealthy for much of Chinese history. Perhaps that is why the Chinese character for home 家 is a pig beneath a roof? This integrated agriculture with Chinese characteristics formed part of Chinese subsistence for thousands of years. In his seminal book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, F.H. King implicates this early integrated recycling system in the unmatched longevity of Chinese agriculture. The origin of this system remains unknown, but it is likely that the answer can be found in the deep past, with China’s earliest farmers.

Research by members of LAEF and others have shown that the earliest farmers of northern China were growing and primarily subsisting on domesticated millets by 7,000 years ago. The relationship between the domestication of pigs and millets as well as how that relationship conditioned or enabled later agricultural and social systems is still unclear. What we do know is that the legacy of agriculture in China as we see it retrospectively, is one where plants and animals, and their by-products, are partnered to meet increasing demands on food needs. Standing on the shoulders of giants the size of thousands of years of (pre)history, my dissertation research seeks to understand the ways the earliest pig herders interacted with their pigs, the social and economic contexts of their initial domestication, as well as how these relationships evolved into the integrated systems we know of today. 

By combining traditional zooarchaeological analysis, ethnoarchaeology, and stable isotopic analysis I am working to reveal the ways and reasons pigs were transformed into dragons, and how that transformation helped humans turn into farmers.

This research is based upon work supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (No. 2016195626). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Wenner-Gren Foundation or the National Science Foundation.

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