Animal Agents in the Human Environment

Summary

Humans’ increasingly close relationship to animals constitutes one of the most important cultural, social, and economic developments of the past ten thousand years of our history, as well as being a key factor in the changes in climate referred to as the Anthropocene. Animals are important resources of food, labor, and secondary products in many societies, as well as symbolically important features of the ritual landscape. As relationships with animals intensify, processes such as domestication ensure that humans are potentially able to control the behavior and deployment of large numbers of animals, altering ecosystems and creating an anthropogenic landscape. However, these types of relationships are heavily structured by the innate attributes of the animals involved. Pre-evolved characteristics create the set of possibilities on which human agents can act, and actions undertaken by animals without the influence of humans can have major impacts on human behavior. Because of this, evaluating "human" environments as complete ecosystems with multiple players is an important part of understanding how we exist within the environment.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20195