Dear Jacqui,
this is a very difficult question because we lack a proper review of the problem
and in Britain in particular there is certainly much overlap in size between
domestic pigs and wild boars. Mesolithic wild boars were rather small and we
are not too sure about how size evolved - for both domestic pigs and wild boars
- from the Neolithic onwards. I have seen some of large pig bones from Roman
Wroxeter that Andy Hammon studied for his dissertation and they are certainly
much larger than Mesolithic specimens and almost certainly derive from wild
animals. In several European areas there is a clear increase in wild boar size
after the Mesolithic (more evident in postcranial bones than teeth), which
means than the biometric separation between wild and domestic forms will work
in different ways in different periods.
In Iron Age Britain, should the domestic pigs have been kept enclosed, I would
expect the separation in size between domestic and wild forms to be
perceivable. The pigs from the site of Micklemoor Hill have been regarded as
wild, but it is an old report and the assumed absence of domestic pigs in an
early Iron Age context is - I think - suspicious. We really need to have
another look at this material.
Clarke J G D and Fell C I. 1953. The Early Iron Age site at Micklemoor Hill,
West Harling, Norfolk, and its pottery. Proc. Prehist. Soc. 19. 1-36.
We are now working towards a full review of the British evidence hopefully with
the help of a PhD student here in Sheffield.
Cheers,
Umberto
--
Umberto Albarella
Department of Archaeology
University of Sheffield
Northgate House
West Street
Sheffield S1 4ET
United Kingdom
Telephone: (+) 44 (0) 114 22 22 943
Fax: (+) 44 (0) 114 27 22 563
http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/albarella.html
"No co-operation in military matters should be an
essential moral principle for all true scientists"
Albert Einstein
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