Interspecies Relationships in Nordic Bronze Age Iconography

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Despite roads and railways around the world being based on the widths of their bodies, non-human animals are now systematically excluded from much of modern western life. In some of the most human-populated areas, animals are forbidden from indoor spaces and from many private outdoor spaces. However, these carefully curated and restrictive relationships we participate in today almost certainly did not exist in the past. Examples of Bronze Age rock art and other artefacts suggest a plethora of different potential interpretations of how interspecies relationships were formed and performed, represented, and upheld in prehistory. The wide range of ‘naturalistic’ and imagined animal motifs on Nordic Bronze Age rock art panels, and their precise placement in rock and in the landscape, challenge classically anthropocentric and capitalistic narratives of interspecies relationships. They also serve to contest standard naturalist categorisations as well as modern western ontologies. This project will demonstrate the value of posthumanist, experiential, and integrative landscape frameworks through case studies of rock art panels and artefacts with animal iconography from the Nordic Bronze Age. In doing so, it will contest rigid, naturalistic, and classically human-focused perspectives, moving towards a more holistic, post-humanist approach of understanding interspecies interactions in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41499.0