A Tale of Dead Kitties: Theorizing Human-Animal Companion Relationships and Social Domestication through the Anatomization of Ancient Cats

Summary

This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Current discourse articulates domestication as a series of actionable, multidimensional processes, shaped by temporally relevant cultural and social factors; “social contracts” (sensu Armstrong Oma) as maintained, agentive, sustained human-animal relationships. This definition is particularly relevant when studying animals who lack distinctive/definitive “changes” with domestication, where we must use contexts and alternative material traces. However, if there is minimal or no direct evidence in the archaeological record, how can we reconstruct domestication? Can animal presence serve as sufficient evidence for presumptive, ongoing domestication? What about interpreting ambiguously evidenced domesticates valued by modern societies, while avoiding potential anachronisms? I propose the domestic cat (Felis catus): often attributed as “marginally-domesticated,” “semi-domesticated,” or even “self-domesticated.” The entrance of cats to ancient life has been surmised through theoretical deliberation, but the validation of these ideas is often speculative. These deep companion-commensal relationships often have scarce archaeological evidence, further complicating our understanding of human-cat dynamics. This talk presents a potential framework for reconstructing early human-cat relationships, combining data on general timing and geographic (archaeological) contexts, with theoretical human-animal relational dynamics and social zooarchaeology. I posit that, to thoroughly explicate cat domestication, and other comparable commensals, one must amalgamate available evidence with appropriate middle-range multidisciplinary theories.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37013.0