Lecture 14 Secondary Products Flashcards
Primary Products:
- Products that can be obtained only once in the lifetime of the animals
- Meat, hide, bone, blood,skin
Secondary Products:
- Products obtained throughout an animal’s life
- Milk, eggs, traction, dung, feathers, honey…
- animal labour
- ## Offspring, wealth..Why are they called ‘secondary products’?
- Term coined by Andrew Sherratt (1981,1983) indicating chronology of their importance, rather than their relative importance. the economic importance
evidence of secondary products
- meat vs milk vs wool
- if the motivation was primary source, their is gonna have a drop during their prima age (younger)
- milk explotation just keep the feamle so often they kill more males,also a drop
- for wool, animals are kept longer like 45 years
WHAT IS THE BRONZE AGE?
Historical period in Old World (~3,300 -1,200 BC):
- Bronze metallurgy
- Emergence of writing
- Urbanization
- Increase in social complexity (social hierarchies)
- Formal governments & bureaucracies
- Development of long-distance trade
- Sumerians (Mesopotamia); Middle Kingdom (Egypt); Shang Dynasty (China); Harappans (Indus
Valley); Minoans (Mediterranean);
SECONDARY PRODUCTS REVOLUTION’ IN THE 1980S
- Revolutionary change in agriculture
and social systems in 4 th -3 rd millennium BC (Chalcolithic) - Radical change in land use (plough),
expansion of livestock (milk/wool)
leading to greater social complexity,
trade, exchange, and urbanisation
(Bronze Age) - Response to new environments
Evidence:
- Plough-marks
- Iconography of yoked animals,
figurines with churns - Cheek-bits, chariots, preserved
textiles, - Kill-off patterns, pathologies
SECONDARY PRODUCTS REVOLUTION’ 30 YEAR ON
- Revolution’ in terms of scale, but not innovation (deep roots for dairying)
- Mosaic of different practices, rather
than cohesive package spreading
simultaneously - Scale and specialisation (3 rd-4 th millennium?)
New Evidence
- Isotope analysis
- Lipid residues on pots
- Ancient DNA analysis
- Kill-off patterns
SECONDARY PRODUCTS examples
- Draught
- Milk
- Wool
DRAUGHT ANIMAL
-
Draught animals, plows and wagons enabled agriculture intensification
-higher yields per labour unit, fewer people, higher return -
Expansion of environmental range for agriculture
¡ Heavier soils could now be cultivated
¡ Greater forest clearance, increased run-off and erosion
¡ Easier transport of people and goods, increased exchange - Neolithic: animals used as beasts of burden and for simple traction
-
Bronze age: wheeled vehicles, wagons, sleds (4th millennium BC)
¡ Cattle = heavy draught; horses and donkeys = faster, lighter vehicle
DRAUGHT ANIMALS
- By 2500 BC in Egypt domesticated
donkeys and horses were commonly
used for riding, carrying loads and
drawing cards, sleds and chariots. - Cows and bulls controlled through
nose-ringing, cutting off horn tips (or
entire horns) and castration
-castartion made them more docile because of hormonal changes - Tomb art from 2400BC shows long-
horn cattle used to pull wooden scratch ploughs, with the plough attached to their horns with rope
IDENTIFYING ‘OXEN’
- Oxen may refer to any cattle
used for draught, but most often
castrated males - Castration reduces aggression
(also changes flavour of meat) -
Morphological evidence:
-Early castration more slender long
bones and longer horn cores
-Late castration = body conformation like bulls
IDENTIFYING ‘OXEN’
Historic sources:
* Roman texts mention sterile cows and bulls, depictions of yoked animals
Archaeological evidence:
* Cattle skeletons buried in pairs (4 th & 3 rd millennium Central Europe); yokes, plows
- Kill off patterns - even numbers of mature females and males (bulls and/or oxen)
HORSES AND MOBILITY
- Egypt: Hunters, warriors and kings rode in chariots, harnessed to small stocky horses
- Saddle: used by Scythians of the Pontic steppes
-
Stirrups: later invention, facilitated riding and warfare
-Not represented in Greece nor commonly described by historians
-Common in Europe only in the 8 th C
HORSES IN AGRICULTURE
¡ Horse power relatively late development.
¡ Horse replaced oxen in Europe
in 11-13 th C AD
¡ Technological development:
non-choking harness (padded
collars), horseshoes
MILK,YOGURTS AND CHEESE
¡ Milk is a nutritious & clean liquid (~85% water)
- Solids: 25-55% sugar; 25-40% fat, 5-35% protein
- Calcium, potassium, B-vitamins
¡ Warm climates: Fermentation into yogurt & kefir
- Bacteria metabolise lactose, produce lactic acid
¡ Cooler climates: cheese
- Digestibility: Separating curds (caseins) from lactose rich whey
- Preservation: hard cheeses can be maintained for longer periods
EVIDENCE FOR DAIRYING
¡ Iconography: depictions of cattle milking in Near East and Egypt (ca. 2600 BC)
¡ Kill-off patterns: Bronze age focus on youngest and oldest age groups
- Milk or wool? Mixed strategy?
¡ Lipid residues: milks fats on pottery
- ~7,500 BC in Anatolia; ~6,000 BC in Europe
- Scale and intensity?
.
DIRECT EVIDENCE OF MILK DRINKING?
¡ Dental calculus entraps proteins during mineralisation
¡ Mass spectrometry has detected ß-lactoglobulin
* Whey protein which segregates with lactose during cheese production
- Can differentiate species of milk producer
¡ Early and Middle Neolithic (3,800-3,300 BC) dental calculus samples show evidence of sheep and cattle milk
LACTASE PERSISTENCE
¡ Lactase Persistence (LP): the
continued activity of the enzyme
‘lactase’ in adulthood
¡ Lactase helps digests the sugars
in milk (‘lactose’)
- ‘Lactose intolerance’ leads to
diarrhoea and flatulence
¡ Most mammals stop producing
lactase after weaning(able to digest lactose) – humans
are the exceptio
LP & ANCIENT DNA ANALYSIS
¡ Low frequency or absence of LP in the Neolithic
¡ First evidence of LP appears in Bronze Age
¡ Increase in LP allele after the massive
migration of Eastern Steppe Herders into Europe
- Yamnaya: Nomad steppe culture heavily reliant on cattle herding and sporadic agriculture
¡ Explains why dairying intensifies in 4th millennium BC?
SHEEP WOOL
there are other types of wool
¡ Unknown when inner woolly fibers replace outer hairy fibers
* Few preserved textiles; Slow development?
¡ Wool slowly replaces plant-based textiles (linen) in Corded-Ware (Early Bronze Age Europe)
¡ Fine wool not developed until 1 st C AD
¡ Wool price increases in Middle age drove conversion of plough land to meadow
- 5% of Crown income in UK derived from wool export tax
WOOL – KILL OFF PATTERNS
- presence of more adults might signify the potential for wool exploitation
IDENTIFICATION OF WOOLLY GENES?
¡ GWAS of ‘woolly’ and ‘hairy’ sheep
- Hairy – primitive breeds, long hair
- Woolly – short woolly fleece
¡ Detected insertion of an antisense retrogene into the IRF2BP2 gene leading to abnormal RNA transcript.
¡ Ancient DNA analysis may be able to detect the origin of this mutation.
