Animal-Human Interactions: Becoming, Creating, Relating

Environment & Society: Advances in Research, 2013

The discipline of archaeology has long engaged with animals in a utilitarian mode, constructing animals as objects to be hunted, manipulated, domesticated, and consumed. Only recently, in tandem with the rising interest in animals in the humanities and the development of interdisciplinary animal studies research, has archaeology begun to systematically engage with animals as subjects. This article describes some of the ways in which archaeologists are reconstructing human engagements with animals in the past, focusing on relational modes of interaction documented in many hunting and gathering societies. Among the most productive lines of evidence for human-animal relations in the past are animal burials and structured deposits of animal bones. These archaeological features provide material evidence for relational ontologies in which animals, like humans, were vested with sentience and agency.

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2017

Archaeology is a field of research that relies largely on the remains of past humans and nonhuman animals and the traces of their interactions within a range of material conditions. In archaeology, as in sociocultural anthropology, the dominant analytical perspective on human–animal relations is ontologically anthropocentric: the study of the human use of nonhuman animals for the benefit of human beings, and scholarly inquiry that is largely for the sake of elucidating what nonhuman animals can tell us about the human condition. This review outlines the historical trajectory of Anglo-American archaeology’s encounters with animal remains, and human–animal interactions, within this framework and considers recent attempts to move beyond anthropocentrism.

What do animals mean to us? What did they mean to people in the past? Why do we kill and eat them, but also worship and love them? This course explores human-animal relationships thematically from an archaeological perspective. The relationships evidenced in the archaeological record will be oriented by broader works from the field of human-animal studies to assess the variable ways that humans may engage with animals, and how animals are instrumental in framing human subjectivities.

European Journal of Archaeology , 2018

2017

This book examines how the study of human-animal relations can help us interpret archaeological evidence. An international range of contributors examines fishing, hunting and husbandry, slaughtering and butchering, ceremonial and ritual practices and techniques of deposition and disposal in traditional societies. Topics covered include the theoretical potential of ethnographic research for zooarchaeology, the use of comparative analogies in the ethnographic and zooarchaeological records, the historical developments of ethnozooarchaeology and specific case studies selected from across the world. This broad geographic approach encompasses examples from different types of societies, ranging from hunter-gatherers to urban populations and from horticulturalists to traditional farmers and pastoralists. This book will be of interest to researchers in a range of fields, including anthropology, ethnohistory and zooarchaeology. 208p, b/w illus (Oxbow Books, 2011). For more information or to purchase visit the publisher's website at: http://www.oxbowbooks.com/bookinfo.cfm/ID/90189 or http://www.amazon.com/Ethnozooarchaeology-Present-Past-Human-Animal-Relationships/dp/1842179977/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1307003856&sr=8-1

Current Swedish Archaeology, 2020

Humans, like other animals, are inextricably bound to their local complex web-of-life and cannot exist outside of relationally interwoven ecosystems. Humans are, as such, rooted in a multispecies universe. Human and non-human animals in their variety of forms and abilities have been commensal, companions, prey, and hunters, and archaeology must take this fundamental fact – the cohabiting of the world – to heart. Human societies are, therefore, not so much human as web-of-species societies. Recently, anthropological theory has explored non-modern societies from the perspective of an anthropology of life which incorporates relationality of local humans and non-human animals, a pursuit that is significant for the diverse contributions in this special section of Current Swedish Archaeology: a themed section which deals with past multispecies intra-actions in a long-term perspective.

Recent, non-anthropocentric explorations of the interaction between human and non-human animals have resulted in many groundbreaking studies. In this 'animal turn', zooarchaeology, which deals with and has access to the material traces of animals that existed alongside humans over the last 2.5 million years, could occupy a privileged and influential position. Despite some encouraging efforts, however, zooarchaeology's ability to contribute to these discussions is heavily limited by the subdiscipline's firm footing within anthropocentric ontologies and reductionist epistemologies. This paper outlines a framework for a new social zooarchaeology that moves beyond the paradigm and discourse of 'subsistence' and of representationist and dichotomous thinking, which have treated non-human animals merely and often exclusively as nutritional or symbolic resources for the benefit of humans. Building on alternative zoontologies which reinstate the position of non-human animals as sentient and autonomous agents, this framework foregrounds the intercorporeal, sensuous and affective engagements through which humans and non-human animals are mutually constituted. These ideas are illustrated with two case studies focusing on human-whooper swan interactions in the Danish Later Mesolithic, based on the faunal assemblage from the site of Aggersund in North Jutland, and the whooper swan remains found associated with the Grave 8 at Vedbaek.

People with Animals: Perspectives and Studies in Ethnozooarchaeology

At once backward- and forward- looking, this paper explores the role that ethnozooarchaeology can play in broadening our horizons in both archaeological and anthrozoological research. The development of the sub-discipline is outlined and a robust defence is made of the use of analogy in archaeological interpretations and the appropriateness of utilising ethnohistorical data within an ethnoarchaeological research framework. The role of language and writing style is emphasised in communicating research properly. It is suggested that ethnozooarchaeological studies, placing an emphasis on how people lived with animals in the past, provides an important context for exploring ancient human societies.