Clawing At Uncertainty: Challenges to Understanding Cat 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.

It is inarguable that domestic cats (Felis catus) are incredibly prolific and popular parts of modern human lives. This is unsurprising given how incredibly well-adapted to anthropogenic environments cats are, thriving and breeding with often minimal-to-no interference necessary by humans. However, despite preoccupation with these charismatic creatures, cat domestication remains poorly understood and largely under-theorized. There is much uncertainty and inconsistency in how we define cat domestication, as process, and domestic cats, as individuals and agents. Traditionally, the domestication of cats is surmised through generalized frameworks that often rely on assumptions about interactions between ancient peoples and animal commensals and/or synanthropes. Furthermore, establishing the applicability of such frameworks to cats often remains speculative. In this talk, I overview some of the complexities and shortfalls in our present understanding of cat domestication, arguing that while cats benefit from an overabundance of interest, they are also buried under a palimpsest of definitions. I also argue we need to reevaluate how we interpret human-cat interfaces to avoid defining cat domestication with a problematic Cartesian nature-culture binary. To better explicate ambiguous interspecies dynamics as with humans and cats, we need continuing, holistic, multidisciplinary discourse and to strive for more flexible interpretations of the past.

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): 51446