Practices of Animal Domestication

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.

Animal domestication is notoriously difficult to define, and most definitions leave out human-animal relations that have some of the characteristics of animal domestication. While I still believe that it is often useful to distinguish wild and domestic animals, we can surely recognize that domestication is a process. For both these reasons, it may be useful to focus on domesticatory practices: the actions deployed to create and sustain a domestic human-animal relationship. These domesticatory practices will always need to be multiple and variable to create a durable relationship, and not all these relationships will look like domestication. That is, one way to escape some of the difficulties of definition is to focus on the process. Potential advantages of this approach include that it would help to spell out more clearly what we mean by terms such as management, herding, or domestication; it would help us think constructively about human-animal relationships that bear some resemblance to domestication but don’t usually count (e.g., storks, Asian elephants, honeybees); and it should foreground care as well as control. It might facilitate collaboration with wildlife management professionals. From a multispecies perspective, we might also consider whether animals engage in domesticatory practices with humans.

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): 51713