Where The Wild Things Aren't: Expanding Domestication Definitions in Indigenous Worlds as a Case Study from Picuris Pueblo, NM

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Domestication has been traditionally rigidly defined, excluding a larger spectrum of species managed by Indigenous groups throughout the world. For example, the management of Caribou by the Sámi, or keeping of Cuy (guinea pigs) by Indigenous Peruvians. In this paper I expand this spectrum of animal domestication to include species traditionally viewed as ‘wild’, including the American Bison and turkey. Using zooarchaeology and ethnographic evidence, I will describe how the Northern Tiwa in New Mexico used their culturally grounded knowledge of the environment to persist and adapt their foodways and interactions with bison and turkey. Drawing on Indigenous conceptions of relationality and non-human animal agency, I advocate that the expansion of domestication definitions allows for a more complex view of human-environment adaptations and Indigenous survivance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow