Technological Choice and Human-Animal Relationships: A Bird's Eye View

Summary

New theoretical attitudes in zooarchaeology have begun exploring the social dimensions of human-animal relationships. As representative of both human-environment and human-material interactions, the dynamics between people and animals go well beyond household economics. This paper presents preliminary results of the analysis of avian remains from the Aleutian Islands as part of a study characterizing the complex relationship between the Unangan people and birds as it changes over time. Here, technological choice is used as a method for parsing out the many contingencies, economic, social, cultural and environmental, that constituted the interactions between Unangan and birds. This approach melds materiality with the classic economic and ecological approaches in order to employ a more comprehensive perspective on the subject-hood, if not subjectivity, that birds and animals retained in Unangan culture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21871