Picking Up the Pieces: The Continued Influence and Impact of Redding's “Breaking the Mold” on Animal Domestication

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.

Richard Redding’s work on “breaking the mold” on how we explain the development of food production is emblematic of the major contributions he made to zooarchaeological thinking: his creativity, curiosity, and willingness to question dearly held beliefs. In this paper, we overview some of Redding’s many insights about expanding our field’s approach to variation in human-animal interactions, particularly his skepticism of unilineal trends, his exhortation to imagine more variable ways for people and animals to interact in the past, and his insistence to meld multiple lines of evidence together without giving any one data source undue primacy. We then discuss how his work influenced our own research into the dynamics of changing human-animal interactions during the early Holocene with cattle in central Anatolia and pigs across northern Mesopotamia. We particularly highlight how Redding’s insights continue to help resolve puzzling patterns and drive inquiry forward.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39266.0