Only the right foreleg is important (Image: Marc Dozier/Corbis)
IT WASN’T so much bring a bottle to British Iron Age parties, as bring a pig’s leg. At a site in south Wales people apparently feasted almost exclusively on the right forelegs of pigs – a mysterious ritual they kept up for centuries.
The dawn of the Iron Age in Britain, beginning about 2900 years ago, was a time of upheaval. The social order in the preceding centuries was based around trade in bronze artefacts – but bronze suddenly lost its value, leading to cultural and economic collapse across Europe and Asia.
“Without this trade network that has been sustaining social order, things get turbulent,” says Richard Madgwick at the University of Cardiff, UK. New cultural and economic systems emerged, which in the south of Britain seem to have been characterised by large gatherings.
“That is demonstrated in vast feasting events,” says Madgwick. “We see a number of mounds that preserve the remains of feasts.”
An Iron Age site at Llanmaes in the Vale of Glamorgan was a particularly important location – but the feasts that occurred there are unlike any others we know of from that time period.
Excavations led by the National Museum Wales between 2003 and 2010 recovered a haul of 73,000 bone fragments, 70 per cent of them from pigs. Analysing them, Madgwick and his colleague Jacqui Mulville found a curious pattern: almost three-quarters of the limb bones came from the right foreleg. Radiocarbon dates on some of the bones suggest that gatherings were held at Llanmaes for at least 700 years – and always featured the right forelegs of pigs (Antiquity, doi.org/6qj).
“It’s an odd pattern and it’s really stringently adhered to for centuries,” says Madgwick.
Isotopes in the bones suggest some pigs were reared locally, but others were brought to the site from elsewhere in south-west Britain. Madgwick says this hints at a highly formalised ritual that might have been important for maintaining social cohesion. Pigs were slaughtered, carefully butchered, the right forelegs were cooked and eaten, and the bones displayed in what eventually became a large pile or midden.
Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, says that rituals associated with the right foreleg, though curious, are surprisingly common – occurring even into modern times in South-East Asia.
“This part of hunted or prized animals is considered quite special and typically goes to the most important men of a community,” Hayden says. Exactly why is unclear, but one theory suggests it might be connected with the movement of the sun.
“In many societies going sunwise is standard protocol in rituals,” says Hayden. “If you face the sun that means going from left to right, hence the right may be the preferred symbolical sector.”
Though rituals may have focused on an elite, Madgwick says, the sheer number of bones suggests the feasts were for the entire community.
The practice might also give us a window into the Iron Age mind. Madgwick thinks that if the right side was such a big aspect of the way people consumed food, that must have been true more generally too. “We can only assume that superstitions against handedness were important within British populations – taboos on handedness were probably overt.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Iron-Agers loved a pig trotter festival”