Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2025
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana," at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are justly famous for nurturing a rich culinary culture. In recent decades archaeologists have made significant contributions to the food history of Louisiana, largely through an expanding dataset of zooarchaeological analyses. But human-animal relations extend far beyond the dynamic between the consumer and the consumed. Animals inspire creativity, condition behavior, and are present in many of the more intimate settings of human life. In this session, we explore different archaeological and historical examples of multispecies sociality that are prior to, outside of, or beyond the animal-as-meat transformation, including: commensality, pets, dray animals, urban wildlife and the feral. Historically, New Orleans was an animal habitat as much as a human one. The organizers propose that the historical worlds we create with our work should be imagined as multi-species habitats, not just human dramas.
Other Keywords
Economy •
Zooarchaeology •
Birds •
Cemeteries •
New Orleans •
Burial •
ontology •
disaster •
pets •
Urban Landscapes
Geographic Keywords
Louisiana •
New Orleans •
Southeast United States •
U.S.
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-6 of 6)
- Documents (6)
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The Cryptic Animism of Pet Burials (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During excavations in the garden behind New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral in 2008 and 2009, we unexpectedly found the carefully buried remains of a domestic cat and a pet dog in contexts dating from the early and mid 20th century. Such burials are consistent with a wider practice of smuggling pets into sacred...
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Hybrid Streetscapes: Reconsidering How Mules Shaped Postbellum New Orleans (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Postbellum New Orleans witnessed significant economic and infrastructural growth and a flurry of cultural changes in music, recreation, and festivities. The one steadfast character in all of this was the Mule, a non-human animal derived from human intervention, whose hybrid vigor they became the city’s linchpin...
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An isotopic-zooarchaeology of 3000 animal lives in historical New Orleans (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Isotopic zooarchaeology has significant potential to move beyond ‘animals-as-meat/products’ perspectives, to explore the manifold ways that humans and animals interacted in the past. This is because isotopic evidence foregrounds animal lives rather than deaths. Whereas osteological approaches often necessarily...
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Love and Loss: Commensal Animals and the Archaeology of Disaster (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Disasters, in both the modern era and historically, are not static occurrences. Disasters are social experiences that affect individuals and communities in a variety of ways. While our modern perceptions of disasters include the social, emotional, and cultural aftereffects of a disaster, the same considerations...
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The Resilient Rat: Nutria in Louisiana (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Entrepreneurs introduced nutria to Louisiana early in the twentieth century in the hopes of reestablishing a diminished fur market. Soon, the unwanted animal overpopulated the coastal regions of the state. State and federal actors unsuccessfully attempted various methods to increase the value of nutria. In 1958...
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Wild Style: Feathers and Fashion in Early Creole New Orleans (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Throughout the colonial period, plantations played an important role in shaping the social and economic landscape of early New Orleans. The developing economies of these early plantations relied heavily on the exploitation of wild animals for food, but animals were exploited for purposes beyond pure sustenance....