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

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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 II" 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.

Other Keywords
Paleoethnobotany • Ideology • Zooarchaeology • Woodland • ontology • and Memory • Historical Archaeology • Racism • Colonialism • Trade and exchange

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • United States of America (Country) • USA (Country) • United Mexican States (Country) • Arizona (State / Territory) • Utah (State / Territory) • Nevada (State / Territory) • California (State / Territory) • North America • Tamaulipas (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)

  • Documents (8)
Documents
  • Corporal Animal Forms as Ritualized Bodies in Burial 5, Moon Pyramid, Teotihuacan (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nawa Sugiyama.

    This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Applying a relational ontological approach to faunal bones I identify animals, secondary animal by-products, and faunal artifacts as persons—in the corporal animal forms of puma, eagle, wolf, and rattlesnake—whom actively engaged with entangled sociopolitical communities of humans....

  • An Intimate Bond: New Evidence for Human-Pig Relationships in Chinese Diaspora Communities (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jiajing Wang. Laura Ng.

    This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pigs and humans have formed a mutualistic and symbiotic relationship since antiquity. In North America, large quantities of pig bones have been recovered from Chinese diaspora sites, indicating the importance of pigs to Chinese immigrant foodways. By analyzing pig dental calculus...

  • Members of the Community: Animal Sculptures as Kin (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only S. Margaret Spivey-Faulkner.

    This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological evidence at the Fort Center archaeological site in south Florida indicates that rooftop statuary depicting animals were treated as members of the community. This evidence is found in the watery interment of these sculptures alongside human community members over...

  • Multispecies Entanglements in Great Lakes Agricultural Landscapes: A Case Study from the Late Woodland Arkona Cluster Sites, Ontario (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindi Masur.

    This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the multispecies entanglements in and along the edges of Western Basin maize fields ca. AD 1000–1300 in southern Ontario, Canada. As these communities became increasingly reliant on agriculture, their construction and management of new field landscapes catalyzed...

  • People-Plant Relationships in Long-Generation Arboreal Fruit Cultivation (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only John Marston.

    This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of human-plant relationships in archaeology is rich and varied, including gathering, cultivation of wild species, domestication, intensive agriculture, and nonfood uses of plants. People-plant relationships in agricultural entanglements, however, have primarily focused on...

  • Racism, Climate Change, and More-Than-Human Agency in Tropical West Africa (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Logan.

    This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I weave together archaeological and historical narratives about two plants in West Africa to explore the pitfalls and potentials of multispecies approaches. I argue that in West Africa, both individual plants and climate change have often been accorded more agentive...

  • Rethinking Our Concepts to Rethink Our Data: Interpreting the Material Culture of Northwest Mexico in Light of Indigenous Theory (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nora Zariñán.

    This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been a while since anthropology experienced an ontological turn that calls to question the universal application of Western concepts, such as nature, culture, and humanity. That questioning, however, has not permeated enough into anthropology, but even much less into...

  • Scarlet Macaws and Place Making in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Schwartz.

    This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over a thousand years, people living in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest (SW/NW) acquired, raised, and kept nonlocal scarlet macaws (Ara macao). Although they are endemic to the neotropics of southern and eastern Mexico and Central and South America, people transported...