Secondary products revolution

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Andrew Sherratt's (1981) model of a secondary products revolution involved a widespread and broadly contemporaneous set of innovations in Old World farming: early use of domestic animals for primary carcass products (meat) was broadened from the 4th-3rd millennia BC to include exploitation for renewable 'secondary' products (milk, wool, traction, and riding/pack transport). Many of these innovations first appeared in the Near East during the fourth millennium BC and spread to Europe and the rest of Asia soon afterwards. They appeared in Europe by the beginning of the third millennium BC (Greenfield 1988, 2005). These innovations became available in Europe due to the westwards diffusion of new species (horse, donkey), breeds (e.g. woolly sheep), technology (wheel, ard) and know-how (e.g. miling, ploughing). Their adoption was to be understood in terms of pastoralism, plough agriculture and animal-based transport in facilitating marginal agricultural colonisation and settlement nucleation. Ultimately it was revolutionary in terms of both origins and consequences (Isaakidou, 2006).

The SPR model incorporates two key elements:

the discovery and diffusion of secondary products innovations
their systematic application, leading to a transformation of European economy and society

(Greenfield 1988, 2005; Isaakidou, 2006).

However, both the dating and significance of the archaeological evidence cited by Sherratt (and thus the validity of the model) have been questioned by several archaeologists. The dangers of dating the innovations on the basis of evidence such as iconography and waterlogged organic remains with restricted chronological and geographical availability have been underlined by writers such as Chapman. Sherratt has himself acknowledged that such dates provide a terminus ante quem for the invention of milking and ploughing (Isaakidou, 2006).

Direct evidence for how domestic animals were exploited in later prehistoric Europe has grown substantially, in quantity and diversity, since 1981. At the beginning, most of the ideas were tested by analysing the appearance of certain artefact types (e.g. ploughs, wheeled vehicles, etc.). By the middle 1980s, the most common means of testing the model derived from the more ubiquitous faunal (zooarchaeological) assemblages, through which mortality patterns, herd management and traction-related arthropathies were utilized to confirm, deny or reject the SPR model (Greenfield 1988, 2005; Isaakidou, 2006). Many zooarchaeological studies in both the Near East and Europe since the early 1980s have confirmed the veracity of the model. However, since 2000, the detection of milk residues in ceramic vessels has gradually pushed back the terminus ante quem for milking into the Early Neolithic of Europe and Asia Minor. This technique is now considered the most promising means of detecting the origins of milking (Copley et al. 2005).

The seeming contradiction between the zooarchaeological and residue studies appears to be a matter of scale. The residues indicate that milking may have played a role in domestic animal exploitation from the Early Neolithic. The zooarchaeological studies indicate that there was a massive change in the scale of such production strategies during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age.

[edit] References

Copley, M.S., R. Berstan, A.J. Mukherjee, S.N. Dudd, V. Straker, S. Payne, R.P. Evershed 2005. Dairying in antiquity. III. Evidence from absorbed lipid residues dating to the British Neolithic. Journal of Archaeological Science 32: 523–546.
Greenfield, Haskel J. 1988. The origins of milk and wool production in the Old World: A zooarchaeological perspective from the Central Balkans. Current Anthropology 29 (4): 573-593.
Greenfield, Haskel J. 2005 A reconsideration of the secondary products revolution: 20 years of research in the central Balkans. In The Zooarchaeology of Milk and Fats (Proceedings of the 9th ICAZ Conference, Durham 2002), edited by Jacqui Mulville and Alan Outram. Oxford: Oxbow Press, pp. 14-31.
Isaakidou, V. 2006. Ploughing with cows: Knossos and the Secondary Products Revolution, pp 95-112. In Animals in the Neolithic of Britain and Europe, edited by D Serjeantson and D Field. Oxbow Books: Oxford.
Sherratt, A. 1981. Plough and pastoralism: aspects of the secondary products revolution, pp 261-305. In Pattern of the Past: Studies in honour of David Clarke, edited by I Hodder, G Isaac and N Hammond. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.