Animal Architecture: Historicizing Nonhuman Material Culture

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As new research continues to reveal the cognitive richness and social complexity of animal lives and as recently developed technologies expand the materials that can serve as traces of the past (as well as the information that can be gleaned from them), the range of activities and actors that can be studied archaeologically and historically extends beyond the human. In this paper, I suggest that archaeologists can adapt methods that have been used to study human prehistory and apply them to illuminate nonhuman animal pasts. Drawing direct comparisons between the material traces of animal lives and the specific kinds of physical remains, archaeological methods, and anthropological theories that have been used to investigate human histories in the absence of texts and living memories, I show how animal architecture—hives, nests, mounds, dams—can be examined over time and space and probed using analogous methods to those employed to excavate and document human buildings and infrastructure.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38602.0