Love and Loss: Commensal Animals and the Archaeology of Disaster

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.

Disasters, in both the modern era and historically, are not static occurrences. Disasters are social experiences that affect individuals and communities in a variety of ways. While our modern perceptions of disasters include the social, emotional, and cultural aftereffects of a disaster, the same considerations are rarely granted to historical disasters. One arena that is often overlooked in disaster situations, even in the modern era, is the loss of commensal animals. In zooarchaeological analysis, commensal animals, scavengers, and other non-food specimens are regularly notated but rarely examined beyond such designations. This paper will consider the relationships between humans and animals in disaster situations. In particular, this paper will examine zooarchaeological specimens from a site in the historic French Quarter that was destroyed in the 1788 fire. This research will show how zooarchaeologists may approach household or domestic assemblages in a more comprehensive manner.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow