Viga Gyula: Népi kecsketartás Magyarországon (Borsodi Kismonográfiák 12. Miskolc, 1981)

ON HISTORY OF SMALL ANIMAL REARING IN HUNGARY (GOAT-KEEPING) (Abstract) The Hungarian ethnographic research has paid special attention to examination of small animals. The different fields, however, are not proportionally examined. Less attention has been paid to animal types having secondary role in the way of life of our people (goat, donkey, ass). The present study aims at outfolding the traditions of goat keeping in Hungary. The author considers the goat, being nowadays only on the second place, to have been a more significant constituent in the way of life of peasantry, and finds goat keeping to have preserved early elements of animal keeping. The first part of the study sums up the general historicalethnographical problems of goat-keeping. The goat is one of the earliest domestic animals, first domesticated in the 8th millenium BC. Thus this animal, together with the sheep, was decisive in the early agriculture between the Mediterranium and West Iran. The first animals of European animal keeping arrived to the Balkan from South-West-Asia in the 7th millenium BC. They were spread north-northwest by the neolithic cultures. The goat had important role in the fauna of domestic animals of the people arriving to the Carpathian Basin during the Neolithic, though soon, no base material for further domestication being present, it lost its significance. Strong goegraphic determination is characteristic of goatkeeping. Two great types of goat rearing were formed by geographic determination. On territories, which could be used only for mountain pasturing, goat keeping joined the great migrational system of European pasture culture. This form could be found, first of all, in the Mediterranium, and also, to a smaller degree, in the area of the Carpathians and the Alps. On the continental territories, in the same time, goat keeping was but an additional moment to the higher manifestations of the culture. It was attached not to the pasturing, but to the animal keeping of the peasantry. The interrelation between the two forms is widescale. The growth of the cultural level throws this animal to the peripheries. Goat keeping adopted to the complex of the geographic and social circumstances. 140