Ecology, ceremony, and animal bones from southern Mesopotamia

Summary

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez has written numerous zooarchaeological papers that wonderfully balance attention to both the ecosystemic and the cultural influences that shape how humans interact with animals. In a 2008 essay exploring zooarchaeology’s potential contributions to the study of daily life, she wrote that pastoralists’ herd management strategies are constructed in the contexts not only of regional ecosystems and animal biologies, but also of human economies, ideologies and politics. At the same time, Gifford-Gonzalez has never discounted the importance of ecology and ethology in shaping human-animal interactions: her widely-read papers address topics from cattle diseases to fur seal ecology.

This paper honors Diane Gifford-Gonzalez’s demonstrations of the impacts that both nature and culture have on zooarchaeological assemblages. It discusses ecosystemic and ideological factors that shaped the patterning of animal remains from the 2nd millennium B.C. site of Tell Sakhariya in southern Iraq.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• "Bones are Not Enough": Research in Honor of Diane Gifford-Gonzalez   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage