Pastoralist Spacetimes and Political Life in the Past: Exploring the Value of Living and Dead Animals Archaeologically

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Anthropological approaches to value assert that creating and contesting value is at the heart of politics. Herd animals offer a complex window into this basic theoretical insight—they are simultaneously producers of and objects of value and their value cannot be easily reduced to the categories of economic or symbolic value. Analyzing archaeological data from pastoralist societies in the Late Bronze Age (1500–1100 BCE) South Caucasus, this paper considers how the different kinds of value-in-action made possible by living and dead animals shaped political authority. The value of living animals emerges from their potential for future reproductive labor and the affective connections forged through interaction. In contrast, the complex value of dead animals enables other kinds of spatiotemporal transformations. Dead animals weave together the semiotic potential of wholeness and fragmentation, memory, and the complex temporal rhythms and the unstable futurities of consumption as a social practice. This analysis highlights how living with, working alongside, and killing and eating herd animals has the potential to generate different kinds of relations between humans and animals, shaping intersubjective spacetimes within more-than-human worlds.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38628.0