Ximena Lemoine

XIMENA LEMOINE, then a graduate student at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, received a grant in April 2017 to aid research on “Pigs in Neolithic North China: Domestication in the Context of Diversity and Regional Expression,” supervised by Dr. Xinyi Liu. This archaeological research project examines developing human-pig relationships during the early Neolithic in one center for the origins of pig domestication: North China. A notable diversity of pig-human domestic partnerships makes this animal a fitting model to begin to understand the contexts of human behavior out of which domestic partnerships developed. Through age and sex demographic reconstruction and stable isotopic analysis of pig populations from Northern Chinese sites, this research identifies the strategies early sedentary communities used to acquire pig resources and evaluates the total range of diversity within those strategies through space and time. The project creates an account of the existing variation of early human-pig relationships by identifying and comparing localized pig-acquisition strategies as practiced by early Neolithic communities in one center for the origins of pig domestication. This research addresses both the contextual contingence of domestication processes and the role of human behaviors in shaping this trajectory by examining the pig-hunting, culling, and foddering strategies from archaeological sites belonging to the Xinglongwa culture and subsequent Hongshan culture in the Western Liaohe River Valley in Inner Mongolia that have been key to understanding the origins of agriculture in China.