Dear Julie,
I think that there are no doubts concerning the rightness of your assumption,
though we should not conclude that pigs cannot survive in woodlands, but in
this case they would require a different type of husbandry. What, however, I
think is questionable is that this occurred from the Iron Age onwards. As the
refs that Terry mentions will indicate there are no reasons to think that pigs
had not always been relying on woodland resources.
The 11th century Domesday Book measures woodland in terms of the number of pigs
that it could sustain. There is probably no better evidence of the close
relationship between woodland and pigs
Here are some more refs you may find useful.
Cheers,
Umberto
Albarella U. 2006. Pig husbandry and pork consumption in medieval England . In
C.Woolgar , D.Serjeantson & T.Waldron ( eds ). Food in Medieval England : diet
and nutrition , pp.72-87 . Oxford : Oxford University Press.
Grant, A. (1988). ‘Animal resources’ in G.Astill and A.Grant (eds.) The
countryside of medieval England. Oxford: Blackwell, 149-261.
Kelly, F. (2000). Early Irish farming: a study based on the law-texts of the 7th
and 8th centuries AD. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Smith, C. (2000). ‘A grumphie in the sty: an archaeological view of pigs in
Scotland, from the earliest domestication to the agricultural revolution’.
Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 130: 705-24.
Williams, A., and Martin, G.H. (eds.) (2002). Domesday Book: a complete
translation. London: Penguin Books, 2002.
Wiseman, J. (2000). The pig: a British history. London: Duckbacks.
--
Umberto Albarella
Department of Archaeology
University of Sheffield
Northgate House
West Street
Sheffield S1 4ET
United Kingdom
Telephone: (+) 44 (0) 114 22 22 943
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http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/albarella.html
For Archaeologists for Global Justice (AGJ) see:
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