Providing Secondary Products: Domestication and Castration

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.

One marker that can be used to distinguish between domesticated and wild animals in the archaeological record is castration. In a herd kept for their secondary products, such as milk, wool, and traction, castration allows for the useful retention of animals that would otherwise be slaughtered. What is less known is the relationship between the use of animal castration and the advent of human castration. The earliest textual references to human castration are about 6,000 years old, from religious hymns to a goddess, but the comfort with the process and idea of human castration in those texts indicates that it must have older origins. The beginnings of human castration may actually be closer to the creation of animal castration (ca 12-10 kya), and may in fact have developed alongside it. It is possible that populations in the past engaged in both animal and “human husbandry”, in an attempt to control groups of war prisoners or slaves. If these captives were thought of as chattel, the same as any other domestic animals, it would be very easy for the dominant group to engage in “human domestication”, using castration to prevent unwanted breeding but retain desired “beasts of burden”.

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): 51715