The Paradox of Livestock: Transformative Agents and Tools of Resilience

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The introduction of Eurasian domesticated animals during the European colonial invasion of the Americas led to rapid, large-scale transformations of North American landscapes, irrevocably altering the relationships between Native people and Native landscapes. Paradoxically, these same alien animals were employed by Native actors as part of strategies for resistance and resilience. This contradiction exists both in the North American Southeast, where livestock were often slow to catch on, and in the Southwest, where cattle ranching dominated the Spanish colonial mission system. In both contexts, despite radical differences in history, ecology, and culture, the day-to-day decisions of 17th and eighteenth-century actors set in motion large-scale and, at times, ferociously rapid feedbacks that were neither intentional nor predicted, but nevertheless transformed human ecosystems and the daily lives of the colonized and colonizer.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38767.0