Risky Research

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sebastian Payne made a lasting impact on zooarchaeology, especially in the Old World, with his 1973 paper outlining age and sex mortality profiles that characterize the prioritization of meat, milk, or wool. Richard Redding was the first scholar not only to suggest that these optimizing models might not be appropriate for ancient societies, but to provide a rigorous alternative model that foregrounded another factor: risk reduction, or security. This was an important intervention, one that started me thinking about other factors that prehistoric herders might have considered as they made culling decisions, such as wealth value. Redding made many contributions to zooarchaeology; I would argue that this is the earliest major one and one of the most enduring.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39619.0