The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past millennia, human communities around the globe have been profoundly impacted by increasing reliance on and entanglement with a broad range of domestic animals. In Eurasia, the early domestication of livestock like cattle, pigs, and caprines and more recent events like the domestication of horse in the Black Sea region, have conditioned diet, material culture, mobility, and worldview. Over the past few centuries, the spread of Eurasian domesticates into the Americas has occurred alongside the expansion of European colonialism—at times reinforcing the colonial project, and at other times facilitating Indigenous sovereignty and resistance. The expansion of these species in these new regions, and their adaptation to and adoption by Indigenous cultures, has often been partially chronicled in the historical record, positioning faunal analysis as an important source of insights into this key transition. This session will explore the dispersals of domestic animals in the Western Hemisphere and their roles in both colonial and Indigenous spheres through a zooarchaeological and anthropological perspective.