Bodies Shaping Bodies: Using Butchery to Trace Human-Animal Relationships

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While our relationship encompasses far more than just the dinner menu, food is one of the key ways in which human and animals lives and bodies directly shape one another. Indeed, beyond just the act of eating, how human and animal bodies meet in the context of procurement and processing can produce tangible traces of how these long-extinguished lives intersected, not to mention highlighting the agency present on both sides of the human-animal equation.

This paper explores how butchery and other coupled taphonomic and zooarchaeological analyses can tease out such aspects of animal use. Examples from the southern African Iron Age—including two intensive, if not specialised, large wild mammal hunting sites—are used to track particular processing choices, their associated taphonomic patterns, and the socioeconomic and craft implications of those strategies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25624