Popular at Iron Age parties (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, huge gatherings involved people apparently feasting 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 uncomfortable change. The social order in the preceding centuries was based around trade in bronze artefacts – but bronze suddenly lost its value leading to widespread 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 to take the place of those lost, and in the south of Britain they 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 massive haul of 73,000 bone fragments, 70 per cent of them from pigs. Madgwick and his colleague Jacqui Mulville then analysed and catalogued the pig fragments. As they did so, a curious pattern emerged: among the limb bones, almost three-quarters came from the right foreleg.

Radiocarbon dates on a handful of the bones suggest that gatherings were held at Llanmaes over a period of at least 700 years – always apparently featuring the right forelegs of pigs.

“It’s an odd pattern and it’s really stringently adhered to for centuries,” says Madgwick.

Explaining the behaviour is tricky. Isotopes in the bones suggest some of the pigs were reared locally, but others were brought to the site from elsewhere in south-west Britain. Given that there are also pig skull bones at the site, Madgwick says animals probably arrived alive – pig heads are heavy but hold relatively little meat and probably wouldn’t have been worth bringing to the feast separately.

Madgwick says this hints at a highly formalised ritual at the site 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. It’s possible that the revellers then preserved the rest of the pork – by salting it, perhaps – and carried it back home, he adds.

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. He thinks they are generally reserved to be eaten by members of a social elite.

“This part of hunted or prized animals is considered quite special and typically goes to the most important men of a community,” he 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 always followed 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 – but this is speculative.”

Madgwick agrees that some kind of elite were probably involved at Llanmaes, but he says the sheer number of bones suggests the feasts must have been for the entire community.

“I don’t know of ethnographic parallels where elite feasting has produced hundreds of thousands of bones – as Llanmaes would if fully excavated.”

The feasting practice might also give us a window into the Iron Age mind. “I find it almost impossible to believe that the right was such an important aspect of the way they consumed their food without also having an impact on the rest of their lives,” says Madgwick. “We can only assume that superstitions against handedness were important within British human populations – taboos on handedness were probably overt.”

Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2015.24