Evolution of a Taboo: Pigs and People in the Ancient Near East by Max D. Price (review)

Pigs are fascinating in that they transcend the “good to eat/good to think” dichotomy: More than any other domesticated meat animal, they remained a powerful, active symbol that retained its divisive socioreligious potency unto the twenty-first century. They are bound in intricate ways to human migrations, urban ecology, and informal economy, and they are a textbook case for the anthropological study of taboo.

From a Levantine perspective, archaeological interest in pigs expanded in the late 1980s following the important contributions by Hesse (1986) and Lev-Tov (2000), which revealed the important economic and cultural role pigs had among the Philistines. These studies placed pigs in a nexus where Iron Age migrations, the ethnogenesis of ancient Israel, and zooarchaeology met, culminating in the suggestion that the absence of pig bones in archaeological sites can be used as an ethnic marker to mark the presence of early Israelites (Finkelstein 1996). With few exceptions (e.g., Redding 2015), the recent decades have seen only slow advancement in understanding the complex interactions of pigs and humans in the southern Levant. A reductionist concept of pigs as binary “ethnic markers,” however, persists among nonspecialists: It finds a place among other reifications of past social entities promoted in part by the archaeological application of recent breakthroughs in human genetics (Heyd 2017). The more exciting research front on pigs appears to have left anthropology behind: it has moved on to the study of domestication, spread, and hybridization of pigs using paleogenetic and morphometric methods, which are biological in essence.

Against this background, Price’s new book opens up a new vista on the anthropological study of pigs in the Near East, and it manages to do that, surprisingly, from the much-frequented viewpoint of the pig taboo. It is innovative in two important ways: First, in its temporal scope, ranging from the Pleistocene to our day; and second, in turning its back on reductionist general explanations and attributing a much greater role to contingency. As the title of the book suggests, the long-duration perspective adopted by the author views the taboo as a social fact in constant development. The taboo’s lasting vitality is the accumulative outcome of Early Bronze Age urban ecology, informal economies, imagined pastoral pasts, Jewish diasporas and revolts, and choices of orthodoxy and orthopraxy among the founders of Christianity and Islam. No single-cause explanation is provided; the right sequence of contingencies, one dependent on the other, opens the evolution of the taboo like a combination lock. Things could have been otherwise, and a strong, persistent pig taboo does not emerge as an inevitable outcome of sociological, ecological, or other general laws.

The scope and its emphasis on historical development necessitate the book’s chronological arrangement into chapters covering Paleolithic hunters, early agriculturalists, Early Bronze Age urban centers, the Iron Age, classical periods, and Islamic to recent times. Additional chapters provide necessary background on pigs, geography, and previous work on the pig taboo. The omnivorous mixture of Near Eastern archaeology, archaeozoology, and general anthropology invites digressions to introduce domestication, population genetics, feasting, urbanization, and other staples of current scholarship. These asides are well written and instructive, and their concise summaries of otherwise broad topics are valuable in and of themselves.

In summary, Max Price’s book offers a fresh look at pigs in the ancient Near East, making an important contribution to the study of the much-discussed taboo. The broad perspective and nuanced view of the topic evades the pitfalls of simplistic explanations, yet the text is written in a simple and communicative manner. It is a laudable contribution that will be appreciated by a potentially broad audience of archaeologists, anthropologists, and others.