Constructing the Herd: Critically Considering the Temporality of Human-Animal Relations in Archaeological Analysis

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.

The concept of the herd is often deployed when discussing systems of animal management in the ancient past, sometimes explicitly but most often implicitly. Due to the nature of the archaeological record, zooarchaeological assemblages often compress multiple generations of livestock into a single dataset. Simultaneously, analysis partitions livestock into species categories that do not necessarily represent the composition of the living, managed, herd. Looking to ethnographic and textual records, evidence demonstrates that livestock can be managed in heterogenous groups that are often in flux, comprised of various ages, sexes, and species of animals. In this paper, I critically approach the notion of the “herd” through questions of temporality and memory. By focusing a lens on the “herd” at the Iron Age site of Tel Abel Beth Maacah, I discuss how temporality is constructed as a part of zooarchaeological analysis and the potential ramifications this has on the discussion of human-animal relationships.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36579.0