Abstract:
The changing care of animals throughout prehistory is often linked to broader social and environmental processes. The development of chiefly hierarchies and the increasingly unstable climate in the Marquesas Islands are factors which likely influenced husbandry traditions. Specific details regarding the care can be difficult to uncover, however, and are traditionally restricted to stable isotope and osteological analyses. Here, dental calculus from Marquesan pigs is processed to extract starch grains and diatoms, direct evidence of plant diet and water consumption. This information was used to inform on husbandry practises, like mobility and diet. Diatom evidence indicates increasingly limited access to clean water through time; this is interpreted as a reduction in mobility due to greater tethering and penning of the animals. The starch grain evidence, analysed through a discriminant function analysis, shows that pigs were fed agricultural cultivars throughout prehistory, including during periods when environmental conditions were poor and food resources limited.
