The fascinating thread about foodways has strayed all over the map.
However, I want to come back to the original question.
 
On our site, we found the heads and feet of swine in a particular class of pit.
 
Overall, on the site, food bones consisted mostly of beef and a little
venison, with plenty of fish, oysters, and clams thrown in for variety.  I
make the distinction between cows and beef because the bones from cattle
are obviously food waste (beef). The swine parts are offal. We need to
distinguish between the animal and the foods derived from it. Of course,
there are no bones in scrapple, sausage, head cheese, or any of the other
gourmet parts, but generally if you slaughter a pig you must eventually
consume the hams and the pork chops if you are to eat the scrapple.
 
My pits contain oyster shells, obvious chimney ash (with daub and brick
flecks), and swine heads and feet. They show no sign of burning, but many
of them are associated with small and very shallow post holes, some of
which are in their bottoms. The pits are about five to seven feet in
diameter, not more than a foot deep below plowzone. The fill is the same in
most all cases. At the bottom is a thin layer of silt that seems to have
derived from water (rain water) lying in the bottom of the pit. Then the
pit was filled with unweathered clods and the above-cited trash, indicating
that it was backfilled soon after it was dug.
 
My proposed scenario is lye-making for soap production. Household ashes and
oyster shells were the raw materials for the lye, and the pig parts were
contributing some of the fat.  My sister-in-law makes lye soap, but she
doesn't make her own lye. Dan Mouer's grndmother made her lye at the rain
barrel.
 
Lye soap making was even more common in Colonial America than it is today.
 
Now, the bone problem. If you eat a ham, you will discard a ham bone.
 
My contention is that our site's inhabitants were putting most of the hog
into the pork barrel, bones and all. I'm told that hog heads were found in
salt pork, but maybe that was a local trait. Anyway, if the mostly edible
cuts of the hog, with associated skeletal parts, went in the barrel, the
gourmet portions might have stayed on the site, to be eaten without leaving
any evidence in the ground.
 
Salt pork was a legal medium of exchange, on a par with tobacco, wheat, and
coin.  So I am suggesting that these farmers were too canny to eat hams and
pork chops. Since they were always in debt to the town merchants, they
salted pork and cured hams for sale, reserving for themselves the sausage,
scrapple, head cheese, lard, and fats.
 
For myself, I could be satisfied to subsist on scrapple and souse while the
rest of the hog paid my store bill.
 
The residents of this site were Native Americans, who were well
acculturated even though they preferred flaked bottle glass for their
cutting tools. The only other site we have identified with this same bone
profile was a related person who we believe was also a Native American.
 
 
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