Towards Exploring Synanthropy and Domesticoidity in Lizards and Snakes

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.

Squamates (lizards and snakes) appear sporadically in most Pleistocene archaeological sites, but attain a much greater significance in the archaeofaunal record of the first sedentary communities in southwest Asia. Robust evidence now exists from Natufian (late Epipaleolithic) camps for capture and consumption of some large-bodied species, and similar evidence is present in later farmer or forager/farmer societies worldwide. In this talk, we discuss the potential role of these often overlooked species in the domestication process. Some of these taxa may have been drawn to the growing human communities because of the increased supply of food (refuse and rodents), creating more opportunities for encounter and exploitation by humans. An additional option for encounter may have been the patches of wild cereal stands that were harvested around these hamlets, at precisely the season when many snakes are the most active. This discussion is needed, first to establish a theoretical basis for approaching squamate/human interactions in prehistory, and second, for finding better frameworks of references to identify these processes empirically. Zooarchaeology is ideal for examining how species alter their range and abundances as a consequence of entering the human niche; we believe it is the time to integrate reptiles in the discussion.

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): 53107