Trans-species Archaeologies and Ritual Bone Deposits: Respecting the Animal Ancestral Dead

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Although created by people, marine mammal bone (e.g., whale, seal, dugong) ritual installations on land and in the sea are also expressions of marine mammal agency given that the sites are materializations of a social and moral contract centered on mutual respect and reciprocity. These sites are as much a part of the sentient, social, and spiritual world of the hunters as they are of the sentient, social, and spiritual word of the animals hunted. Hunters know that unless they treat marine mammal bones with respect and construct formalized and highly structured installations using the bones, especially skulls, of their prey, that their relationship with the marine mammals will break down and result in hunting failure. In other words, marine mammal bone installations were constructed by people for people but also, critically, for marine mammals. Marine mammal bone installations blur the boundary between the archaeology of humans and the archaeology of animals. These installations encompass a trans-species archaeology of human and animal agency that extends recent ideas on “multispecies ethnography.” They also require us to ask the radical ontological question of “What do marine animals think of the installations comprising the bones of their ancestral kin assembled by hunters?”

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38514.0