Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana

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.