Domestication and its Discontents

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How we study domestication often gets in the way of conceptualizing what we’re actually interested in studying. Vere Gordon Childe’s Man Makes Himself offers few details about the process of plant and animal domestication, noting that people “began to... cultivate” certain plant species and “succeeded in taming... certain species of animals in return for... fodder... protection... [and] forethought” (Childe 1936: 59). While the particulars of our domestication narratives have shifted since then, teleological traps continue to plague domestication research and push us to overinterpret past variation in human/environmental relationships. In this talk, I will overview some of the ways this adaptationist impulse limits our imagination about past human/environmental dynamics and hampers our ability to interpret archaeological patterns. These issues include a focus on animal status, an emphasis on dyadic relationships, and the primacy of reproductive control. Further, this teleological focus separates the modern-day from the “drama” of the past—presenting domestication as a process, yes, but one that was completed long before today. Moving past these roadblocks can give us a more dynamic research field, one that is more receptive to middle range research and can incorporate insights from varied ways people interact with our environments today.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51304