Subsistence strategy and the divergent fates of PPNB megasites: Pig intensification as a key to settlement persistence into the seventh millennium BC

Most Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B megasites in the southern Levant were abandoned by the early seventh millennium BC, yet a few persisted. Research has focused primarily on why settlements collapsed, whereas the factors enabling persistence have received far less attention. We address this gap by analyzing a new faunal assemblage from Motza, a megasite in the Judean Hills that maintained dense occupation throughout the Final PPNB, and by comparing its economic structure with that of eleven contemporary megasites across the region. Compositional PCA and LDA of faunal proportions reveal that persistent and abandoned megasites occupy distinct, non-overlapping regions of multivariate space. Across assemblages, the separation is not driven solely by the dominant taxa (caprines), but rather the extent to which pig husbandry was integrated into the subsistence economy. Biometric and demographic data from different phases at Motza indicate that this pattern reflects managed production rather than incidental presence, as evidenced by body size reduction and intensive juvenile culling. We propose that pig intensification functioned as a settlement-proximate, household level provisioning strategy that reduced dependence on landscape-scale grazing and enabled dense communities to buffer the logistical costs of aggregation.