Wild Animals in Cities: A View from South Asia’s Early Historic Period Using a Zooarchaeological and Textual Approach

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Urban settings are often imagined as fully domesticated landscapes, but in fact cities are complex ecosystems where many kinds of animals, including non-domesticates, play important roles. Textual evidence from the Early Historic period of South Asia gives us a glimpse at the diverse animal communities present in cities from this time period. A comparison of the ecologically complex cities implied by these texts to zooarchaeological evidence from the urban site of Sisupalgarh, East India, provides clues as to how economies and relationships to the natural world evolved in cities as external factors such as religious and ideological changes altered people’s approaches to animals. During the early period of its occupation, the economy of Sisupalgarh relied on a broad range of both wild and domestic animal resources, but by the later period of its occupation, domestic animal remains dominate the faunal assemblage. This presentation will explore how textual evidence can present possible explanations for this change and provide clues as to the economic and depositional processes that resulted in the recovered faunal material at Sisupalgarh. More broadly, it will discuss how we can expand these insights to think about biases present in the fauna recovered from archaeological excavations of urban sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32521