Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Richard Redding’s scholarship, leadership, and teaching has left profound and lasting impacts on generations of scholars. This session strives to honor his intellectual impact and scientific legacies, particularly on those studying human-animal interactions in the Near East, Europe, and Africa. Scholars working in diverse areas and periods owe a debt of gratitude to his intellectual curiosity and creativity. Papers in this session highlight the foundational contributions of Richard’s work, the creativity with which he combined his background in biology and ecology with his intricate knowledge of archaeology, and his ability to link the archaeological record and modern-day pastoral strategies.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)

Documents
  • The Animal Provisioning System for a Late Bronze Age Temple at Hazor, Israel (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Lev-Tov. Kevin McGeough.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The tel site of Hazor, Israel is one of the largest such occupational mounds in the southern Levant. Excavated in the 1950s, 1960s, and continuously since the 1990s, archaeologists have uncovered monumental public buildings. One such building, now identified as one of several Late Bronze Age temples,...

  • Archaeological Legacy Data and Archaeological Data Legacies (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Whitcher Kansa. Eric Kansa.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although digital repositories are well established, many researchers still use informal ways to share data, such as email. This type of sharing runs a great risk of information loss because data is often not well documented or formally described. One could argue, in fact, even new data is legacy data if...

  • The Biological Baseline in Zooarchaeology: Unpacking the Domestication of South American Camelids (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Moore.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The domestication of llamas and alpacas in South America resulted in compelling similarities to sheep and goat pastoralism in Western Asia, but the underlying biology of the wild ancestors of camelids provided distinct challenges to human control and selection. The pastoral economies of South America...

  • Cattle Production and Strategic Meat Distribution in Egypt and Nubia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Shayla Monroe. Melina Seabrook.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Reddings‘s (1992) model developed at the site of Kom el-Hisn offered a means of understanding strategies by which ancient societies could strategically raise animals for the purpose of provisioning communities in multiple locations. This model proved useful for understanding meat provisioning...

  • Decision-Making in Subsistence Herding: A View from Mediterranean Europe (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah McClure.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Redding’s body of research pushed zooarchaeologists to think more deeply and creatively about human-animal interactions. His 1981 dissertation “Decision-making in Subsistence Herding of Sheep and Goats in the Middle East” set the stage for his impactful career, bringing together multiple...

  • A Hippo Hip and and an Olive Pit (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Lehner.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How Richard Redding's identification of a hippopotamus hip bone catalyzed a rethinking of the Heit el-Ghurab site of 4th Dynasty (ca. 2500 BCE) settlement at the Giza Pyramids, and how central authorities mobilized and organized labor for building pyramids.

  • Local Organization in Imperial Settings: Evidence from Late Antique and Middle Islamic Dhiban, Jordan (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Lau. Alan Farahani. Sarah Whitcher Kansa. Benjamin Porter.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the many intellectual legacies of Richard Redding’s work is his exploration of how local communities made provisioning decisions to meet both their own local needs and demands by political authorities. This paper examines these themes among inhabitants of ancient Dhiban, Jordan during the Late...

  • Picking Up the Pieces: The Continued Influence and Impact of Redding's “Breaking the Mold” on Animal Domestication (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Wolfhagen. Max Price.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Redding’s work on “breaking the mold” on how we explain the development of food production is emblematic of the major contributions he made to zooarchaeological thinking: his creativity, curiosity, and willingness to question dearly held beliefs. In this paper, we overview some of Redding’s many...

  • Reassessing Herd Management Strategies in the Early Bronze Age of Southern Israel-Palestine: Preliminary Insights from Tell el-Hesi (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Larson.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Current discussions of herd management strategies employed in the Early Bronze Age III (EB III) in southern Israel-Palestine are often painted with a generalized brush. However, emergent data from the early urban EB III site of Tell el-Hesi, Israel, suggests a site-level perspective is required,...

  • Risky Research (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nerissa Russell.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sebastian Payne made a lasting impact on zooarchaeology, especially in the Old World, with his 1973 paper outlining age and sex mortality profiles that characterize the prioritization of meat, milk, or wool. Richard Redding was the first scholar not only to suggest that these optimizing models might not...

  • Toward a Multispecies Perspective on Human-Animal Networks in Early Urban Societies of Upper Mesopotamia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades before anthropologists advocated for multispecies anthropology and ethnography, Richard Redding was charting a new path for a multispecies approach to anthropological archaeology. His research reveals an implicit awareness of the complexity of human-animal relationships that is a hallmark of...

  • Understanding Livestock in Political Economies in West Africa: Archaeological Insights Inspired by the Legacy of Richard Redding (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Dueppen.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Amongst his many intellectual contributions, Richard Redding was a leading scholar in the use of zooarchaeology, specifically the production, distribution, redistributio,n and consumption of animal products, to understand political economies. Through systemic approaches, Redding was able to explore the...

  • Variability in Human-Animal Interactions at the Emergence of Animal Domestication in Southwest Asia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Munro.

    This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his 2002 paper “Breaking the Mold,” Richard Redding wrote that “by focusing on the emergence of tactics of animal use that characterize the Neolithic, we may be missing aspects of the process that are not only interesting but critical to building and testing explanations.” Twenty years later, our...