Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Traditional discourse describes domestication as a complex and transformative process, widely recognized as one of the most significant shifts in human-animal relational dynamics. However, as with many foundational concepts, precise definitions of ‘domestication’ are complicated by multilayered and multigenerational insights and expectations (e.g., domestication as a state of being, as a biological process, as a lived/social experience). This 'palimpsest' of definitions can make it difficult to investigate and interpret human-animal interactions like domestication, particularly when the nature of these relationships is uncertain and multifaceted, as is often the case in the archaeological record. There is also understandable dissatisfaction about how domestication is often still conceptualized, as some ‘traditional’ models propose ‘universal’ (human-dominated) domestication narratives, which draw on intuition or expectations grounded in western scientific ontologies. While some domestication cases align with these traditional narratives, there are many ‘atypical’ species and relationships that do not follow ‘expected’ domestication trajectories but still provide needed insights into the variability of human-animal interactions. The purpose of this symposium is to showcase a range of theoretical perspectives, approaches, and case studies that challenge the universality of human-dominated domestication narratives and exemplify the variety of interactions that can and should be incorporated into ‘domestication research’.

Other Keywords
Zooarchaeology • Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology • Subsistence and Foodways: Domestication

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

Documents

Clawing At Uncertainty: Challenges to Understanding Cat Domestication (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophie Miller.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is inarguable that domestic cats (Felis catus) are incredibly prolific and popular parts of modern human lives. This is unsurprising given how incredibly well-adapted to anthropogenic environments cats are, thriving and breeding with often minimal-to-no interference necessary by humans....
The Deer Turn: A Zooarchaeological Case Study Approach to Reimagining Dualistic Ontologies of Human-Red Deer Relationships in Scottish Prehistory (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kath Page.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Certain species defy traditional narratives of domestication, seemingly occupying the space between wild and domesticates. One such animal is the Scottish red deer (Cervus elaphus Scoticus). Contemporary red deer ontologies appear to have developed from 18th century...
Domestication and its Discontents (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Wolfhagen.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How we study domestication often gets in the way of conceptualizing what we’re actually interested in studying. Vere Gordon Childe’s Man Makes Himself offers few details about the process of plant and animal domestication, noting that people “began to... cultivate” certain plant species and...
Domestication Rewilded: A Framework in Eight Dimensions for Parsing Domestication Concepts Across Disciplines (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Evans.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most scholars now agree that domestication involves intertwined biological and socio-cultural factors, though tend to favour one or the other ‘side’ according to their disciplinary position. Such binary understandings of domestication, constrained by classic distinctions between ‘nature’ and...
Exploring Modern Reindeer Herding Systems in Northeast Asia: Tracing Multispecies and Domestication Processes (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Morgan Windle.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across Northern Eurasia reindeer have helped shape the complex socio-cultural fabrics of hunter-fisher societies. Descendant communities co-create entwined multispecies lifeways through symbiotic relationships with the subarctic boreal ecosystem. Within this system, an intimate partnership...
<html>Looking the Part: Assessing the Ability of Craniometrics and Morphological Indices to Distinguish Canis latrans Skulls from Canis lupus and Canis familiaris</html> (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Buckser.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although 3D geometric morphometric analysis is the preferred method of analyzing skull morphology in canids, many parties lack funding or training needed for such assessments. Instead, they must rely on the simpler and more affordable methods of craniometrics and morphological indices to...
<html>Semi-feral Sacrifices? People, Aurochsen, and Bos taurus in the Early Holocene Eastern Sahara.</html> (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Shayla Monroe.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contentious debate over the possibility of an independent domestication event for African cattle has recently been reignited, but the debate continues to hinge upon designating early African Bos elements to either Bos taurus (of Southwest Asian origin) or Bos primigenius africanus, the...
Practices of Animal Domestication (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Nerissa Russell.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal domestication is notoriously difficult to define, and most definitions leave out human-animal relations that have some of the characteristics of animal domestication. While I still believe that it is often useful to distinguish wild and domestic animals, we can surely recognize that...
Providing Secondary Products: Domestication and Castration (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Reusch.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One marker that can be used to distinguish between domesticated and wild animals in the archaeological record is castration. In a herd kept for their secondary products, such as milk, wool, and traction, castration allows for the useful retention of animals that would otherwise be slaughtered....
Questioning Calories, or Why Did People Initiate Animal Domestication? (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Price.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We can define animal domestication as a type of evolutionary process, one initiated when humans increased their control over the reproduction, diet, and mobility of certain animal populations, thereby unintentionally selecting for novel traits in these populations. Domestication occurred in...
Towards Exploring Synanthropy and Domesticoidity in Lizards and Snakes (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Reuven Yeshurun.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Squamates (lizards and snakes) appear sporadically in most Pleistocene archaeological sites, but attain a much greater significance in the archaeofaunal record of the first sedentary communities in southwest Asia. Robust evidence now exists from Natufian (late Epipaleolithic) camps for capture...
White-tailed Deer Management in the Archaeofaunal Record of Parita Bay and the Sabana de Bogotá (2025)
DOCUMENT Citation Only María Martínez-Polanco.
This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Management refers to "the manipulation of the conditions of growth of an organism or the environment that sustains it, in order to increase its relative abundance and predictability, and to reduce the time and energy required to harvest it." This process is one of the preliminary steps before...