Predomestic Animal Management and the Social Context of Animal Exploitation in SW Asia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

More than a century of faunal work seeking evidence for the origins of domestic livestock in SW Asia has shed considerable light on the timing, locations and processes of animal domestication. The early stages in the shift from hunting to herding, however, remain difficult to identify and as a result both the mechanisms and motivations for early management remain unclear. A growing body of bioarchaeological evidence suggests that initial shifts from hunting to herding occurred well before the appearance of either the domestic phenotypes or demographic profiles commonly used to identify herd management, and were sporadic, hesitant, and based on dynamic local traditions of human-animal inter-relations. In this paper, I explore this current evidence for predomestic animal management in the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene in SW Asia and address what this may tell us about the motivations for and social context of early animal management.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24927