The Cryptic Animism of Pet Burials

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

During excavations in the garden behind New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral in 2008 and 2009, we unexpectedly found the carefully buried remains of a domestic cat and a pet dog in contexts dating from the early and mid 20th century. Such burials are consistent with a wider practice of smuggling pets into sacred spaces and human cemeteries in the United States that dates back to at least the Victorian period. I argue that the relationship of human mortuary practices to those for beloved pets is a dynamic one that is about more than anthropomorphism. Further, they indicate that ontological beliefs about “spirits” is far more lively – and animistic – in our familiar world than is commonly acknowledged. In this paper, I contextualize the archaeology of pet burials with findings from my recent ethnographic work on contemporary American death practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow