Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have long espoused interpretive approaches that illuminate the agency of human actors in the past. This session aims to deconstruct the centrality of humans within our narratives by considering the ways that other-than-human beings were integral in shaping practice and ideology across the world. Multispecies archaeology has recently become an important way of reorienting approaches to subsistence practices, herding lifeways, landscape transformations, settlement histories, and interregional interaction. By examining the interactions and entanglements of different, possibly multiple, species that form parts of foodways, modes of transportation, and ways of being on a landscape, we will explore how diverse species that may have held distinct value for past societies impacted and transformed daily and long-term activities. Multispecies frameworks contend that the primacy of human agency obscures heterarchical relationships within ecologies and the world at large. Participants in this session are encouraged to consider plants, animals, and other beings including the broader environment as agentive forces that constrained, afforded, and shaped human lifeways and beliefs. Theoretical and methodological perspectives may include posthumanism, osteobiography, kincentric ecologies, ethnography, paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, landscapes, and biomolecular approaches, among many others.