In the Easter service I attended the preacher worked the Parable of the Prodigal Son into his sermon and I wanted to get the story's broader cultural context, and also a couple more specific questions.

Firstly, the preacher mentioned that when the son asked for his inheritance early it's as if he had told his father "I wish you were dead" and that the father could have, by all rights, disowned his son right there; is that a true statement?

Secondly, the story says that after foolishly spending his money the son is forced to work on a pig farm, but I've heard archeologists say one defining feature of Jewish settlements going back to 1500 BCE is a lack of pig bones in refuse piles. Should the story be understood as saying the son was literally working for "the enemy", the occupying Romans, or is it a metaphor for doing work considered beneath the station of the son of a man of some wealth, as the father appears to be? If the former, how common in 1st century Judea were farms (specifically those raising pigs) owned by Romans; if so how common would it have been for the paid laborers to have been Jewish (I'm guessing quite common since they were the majority of the local population); and if so would a Roman farm owner have reasonably expected his hired help to do work against their religion, in this case touching an "unclean" animal?