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Veteran Member
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Orlando
Posts: 2,014
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The Pig Bone Problem
Hi Toto,
Thanks for this article quoting Hector Avalos from John Loftos.
We may also note this from the article in Science Daily:
Quote:
How do we know this is a Judean fortress?
The early Hebrew ostracon, Judean pottery similar to that found at other Israelite settlements, and the absence of pig bones among the animal bones found at the site all point to this fortress being a city of the Kingdom of Judea.
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We can ask how sure are we that the absence of pig bones are an ethnic marker for Judaism? Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Steven M. Fowles suggest that we cannot be certain at this point at all. He writes In Steps Toward An Archaeology of Taboo:
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The most widely studied food taboo, of course—both in anthropology generally and archaeology more specifically—is the Jewish pork prohibition. Generations of scholars have weighed in on this matter, most proposing their own theory as to why the writers of Deuteronomy and Leviticus abominated so potentially valuable a food resource as the pig simply because it “divides the hoof but does not chew the cud.” Among ethnologists, Valeri (2000) offers the most recent reassessment. Critiquing Douglas’s earlier position (1966; but see also Douglas 1975:288), Valeri argues that the food taboos of Leviticus were not about abstract classificatory logics but were more centrally concerned with issues of identity. The taboos, he suggests, established a fundamental moral hierarchy between Hebrews and the gentile Other: Hebrews were to Gentiles as “normal” animals were to “anomalous” creatures, such as the pig. Hence, the eating of “normal” animals and the explicit not eating of those that are “abnormal” is taken as an ideological strategy used by Hebrews to reproduce themselves as a culturally distinct and superior people (Valeri 2000:80). When one consumed only the normal, one maintained one’s own status as “normal,” and when outsiders consumed the abnormal, their ontological status became tainted, “abnormal,” inferior.
Such models are designed to be evaluated on the basis of their structural co-
herence and the degree to which they “make sense” of the seemingly nonsensical. But cultural traditions are never fully coherent nor fully sensible, as archaeological research into this issue has recently emphasized. In the past 20 years, the antiquity of the Jewish pork prohibition has emerged as a critical archaeological question in the Levant, and my interests in this research are twofold. First, zooarchaeologists investigating the pork prohibition have begun to significantly complicate the explanatory models developed by ethnologists. For instance, in Valeri’s model the pork prohibition is portrayed as having a single rationale (identity politics) that changed little over the past three millennia. Lip service is paid to the reality that the taboo had its origin in a particular historical context (Valeri 2000:110), but history itself remains impotent, a background out of which structures and identities spring rather than a process of continuous structural renegotiation and transfor mation. The archaeological database, in contrast, demands that we adopt a messier, more dynamic, and ultimately more realistic picture (see below). My second interest in this research is more methodological, for here one finds a relatively clear struggle to construct arguments using negative evidence. Simply stated, the key issue in this case is whether the absence of pig bones at certain sites can itself point to the presence of a formal religious taboo.
The following discussion is based on the work of Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish (Hesse 1990, 1994; Hesse and Wapnish 1997, 1998), who have recently developed a regional database to inductively assemble a genealogy of pork consumption and avoidance in the Near East from Neolithic through Medieval times. Unlike most ethnological discussions, Hesse and Wapnish’s research is explicitly anti-essentialist: their starting point is a detailed consideration of the various ecological, economic, and political factors that must be taken into consideration when evaluating the plausibility of the taboo hypothesis. Their “pig principles” include the expectations that pig exploitation will tend to be higher (1) in wetter ecozones, (2) among more sedentary populations with a domestic mode of agro-pastoral production, and (3) among recent immigrants to a region looking to quickly establish a protein source. Hesse and Wapnish note that “social class” in the Near East can be expected to affect distribution patterns as well, pig meat tending to be viewed as commoner fare by the elite.
In light of the above, Hesse and Wapnish interpret the archaeological evidence with due caution. They note, for instance, that following widespread early use of the pig during Neolithic through Middle Bronze Age times, most of the Middle East had given up pork consumption by the end of the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.) in response to what appears to have been primarily nonreligious, ecological factors. Hence, the small percentages of pig bone recovered from sites in the central hill country of Canaan during the succeeding Iron AgeI (1200–1000 B.C.E.)—in other words, during the debated period of an emergent Israelite identity—are far from distinctive: “If the absence of pig bones in an IronAge archaeological site is taken as diagnostic for the presence of ethnic Israelites[i.e., of the pork prohibition], there were a lot more Israelites in the ancient world than we ever suspected. . . . If this sounds unbelievable, it is” (Hesse and Wapnish (1997:238). From their perspective, the absence in question was not a conspicuous absence, weakening the hypothesis that a formal Hebrew taboo on pork consumption was in place during the eleventh century B.C.E.
Others disagree. During Iron Age I the regional pattern of low pig consumption was disrupted briefly by the immigration of “pig-loving” Philistines into the southern Levant, at which point a relatively clear contrast emerged between substantial pig consumption at many coastal Philistine sites and the marked absence of pig bone in the core Israelite area (Hesse 1990; Hesse and Wapnish 1997:248). In light of this pattern, some archaeologists have argued that political tensions between the proto-Israelite population and the newly arrived Philistines led an existing pattern of pig avoidance to be ideologically recast into a formal religious taboo by at least some proto-Israelite communities (Finkelstein 1997:230; King and Stager 2001:119). It does appear that pig avoidance during the Iron Age could have been emphasized as a means of saying that one was “not Philistine,” but given that the rest of the Levant largely shared the same avoidance, did it really serve as a core part of Jewish identity or theology? Hesse and Wapnish (1997:261) suggest the Iron Age evidence is equivocal, noting that it is only much later, during Hellenistic times, that archaeological and textual data unambiguously document the prohibition as a marker of Jewish communities.
As should be evident, archaeology here makes a major contribution. The pork prohibition is historicized, and we begin to grasp its complicated genealogy, its changing significations. In this sense, Hesse and Wapnish’s research should be carefully followed by all sociocultural anthropologists who may be tempted to make broad (ahistorical) statements about the “nature” of this most archetypal of food taboos. Archaeology reveals that religious prohibitions can have unstable life histories that slip between the fingers of rigidly structuralist interpretations.
That said, archaeologists studying the pork prohibition still have their work cut out for them. We remain unable to state with confidence when and where the pig began to be the focus of specifically religious avoidance in the Levant. This is largely because most archaeologists are interested in patterns of pig consumption/avoidance to the extent that they reflect the ethnicity of communities as social wholes, whereas the more pressing issues surrounding taboo as a religious phenomenon may need to be explored at an intra-community level. A case in point is found in Herodotus’s (1942:140–141) discussion of the pig in ancient Egypt, in which he notes that “the pig is regarded among them as an unclean animal, so much so that if a man in passing accidentally touches a pig, he instantly hurries to the river, and plunges in with all his clothes on”—a classic taboo down to the concern with touching, uncleanliness, and purification. And yet, in the same breath, Herodotus also observes that the Egyptians did raise pigs. Swineherds were rendered ritually impure and socially undesirable by their profession; nevertheless they—as well as those they supplied with meat—coexisted with the priests and other seekers of ritual purity who actively observed the taboo. The taboo was present, but so too its transgression. Following Bataille (1977:63), we might even conclude that the former depended upon, and was made meaningful by, the latter.
Hence, to understand pig avoidance as a religious phenomenon, one must not only compare the faunal percentages of different communities or regions but also attend to those conspicuous absences that are to be found within individual communities. (As in archaeological investigations of religious ritual and belief generally, detailed contextual data lie at the heart of all interpretation.) Hesse and Wapnish (1997:251–252) have begun this project, drawing the tentative, but significant, conclusion that pig bone is negatively associated with ritual contexts throughout much of Near Eastern antiquity. Only when studies are designed to search out meaningful absences at this contextual scale will we be able to truly speak of an “archaeology of taboo” in this area
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From this, it seems that we do not know the period of time when absence of pig bones begins to indicate the presence of the Jewish religion. This suggests that attribution of the text to a Jewish community is a leap of faith rather than a scientific conclusion.
Warmly,
Philosopher Jay
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Originally Posted by Toto
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01-15-2010, 07:54 AM
This link should get its own thread.
