Pigs and polities in Iron Age and Roman Anatolia: An interregional zooarchaeological analysis

Anatolia witnessed an increase in mobility and interaction during the Iron Age. Peoples from Southeastern Europe and Southwest Asia migrated into and across Anatolia. At the same time, under the influence of expanding and competing polities, trade and military mobility reinforced supra-regional networks across land and sea. Little is known about how animal husbandry practices in Iron Age Anatolia changed in the face of these large-scale movements of people and goods. Especially little understood remains how past mobility and connectivity influenced pig husbandry, as pigs are generally considered rather immobile animals, and Iron Age animal mobility studies tend to focus on pastoralist practices (e.g. Hammer and Arbuckle, 2017). Yet, pig husbandry practices are highly plastic, and may have changed dynamically along with evolving economic and socio-cultural circumstances during the first millennium BC. In addition, palaeogenetic studies provide evidence that durign the Iron Age pigs with European lineages appeared and subsequently spread over Anatolia (Ottoni et al., 2013) suggesting pigs may have been actively incorporated in trade and mobility. Building on these two observations, this paper explores pig husbandry practices over the course of the Anatolian Iron Age (1200–600 BCE) by (1) discussing diachronic change in relative abundance of pigs and mortality patterns over different sites in first millennium BC Anatolia; (2) investigating whether the introduction of European pigs in Anatolia coincided with noticeable phenotypic changes in pig populations by looking at pig biometry using the R package zoolog. Primary data from various key sites are presented (Troy, Klazomenai, Gordion, Kerkenes, Kinet Höyük) alongside a meta-analysis of published zooarchaeological data.