Creatures of Care: Assembling Livestock Worlds within Archaeofaunal Datasets

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Care and Power" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper builds on the work of Duclos and Criado to dive into the speculative potential of a framework of care by considering how archaeological worlds are constructed through multispecies relationships in diverse and multiple ways. Speculating about care requires acknowledging relationalities across categories. This has significant implications for how multispecies relationships can be theorized in archaeofaunal datasets through the (re)interpretation of animal remains across age, sex, and species categorizations. In this paper, I will interpret faunal assemblages through a lens of “ecologies of divergence” in order to speculate on how nonhuman animals navigate pre- and post-mortem pathways of care. Applying this approach to the interpretation of taxonomic frequencies and demographic profiles of livestock, this framework is used to map disparate ecologies of care across the spatio-temporal assemblages of an archaeological site in Southwest Asia, Tel Abel Beth Maacah. In this way, care will be used to consider how livestock construct vibrant more-than-human communities, while contesting an anthropocentric view of ancient urban sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• The Archaeology of Care and Power

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51158