Where the Wild Things Are Not: Human-Animal Interaction in the Space between Wild and Domestic

Western tradition has tended to view animals in a binary opposition of wild versus domestic, with limited appreciation for forms of cultural engagement with animals in the space between these poles and little recognition that these liminally-placed relationships do not inevitably lead to animal domestication. Archaeologists no longer treat the wild-domestic transition as a threshold. Instead they have come to view domestication as a continuum or a range of possible pathways that may be followed. With this shift in perspective, growing attention has been devoted to the diversity of human-animal interactions that occur between the fully wild and fully domestic states, the cultural underpinnings of such relationships, and their zooarchaeological correlates. Significant questions in this area of scholarship are many. What social, political, and economic functions do non-wild, non-domestic animals fill? Under what conditions do such roles arise? What circumstances initiate a trajectory toward domestication, and, where this does not ultimately occur, why not? This symposium will explore these questions and related topics through examination of practices such as taming, pet keeping, wild management, captive management, animal translocations, commensal relations, and other forms of human interaction with animals that are neither wholly domestic, nor truly wild.