Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Domestication is a loaded term. At its most cartoonish, it conjures images of ‘man’ taming wild beasts into submission - an image often thought of as a discrete event involving a dominator-dominated relationship that inevitably culminates in the rise of complex societies. While plant and animal domestication is crucial to understanding ever-evolving human-animal-environmental interactions, less attention has been directed at the ways in which the confluence of ecology, culture, history and biological variables have shaped the domestication relationships along a time continuum. Moreover, the techniques used by archaeologists have also expanded to include novel shape analyses and molecular biological and DNA approaches.

This symposium focuses on specific plant and animal case studies, each of which details the ways in which new thinking about the pattern and process of domestication is dispensing with the cartoon and replacing it with a far more satisfying narrative that includes an appreciation for continual evolutionary change, but within a human and cultural context that allows for different selective pressures to alter the phenotypes of the species on whose existence we now rely. In addition, each paper will highlight how novel theoretical and methodological approaches will contribute to future research into domestication.