Abstract
Humans, like other animals, are inextricably bound to their local complex web-of-life and cannot exist outside of relationally interwoven ecosystems. Humans are, as such, rooted in a multispecies universe. Human and non-human animals in their variety of forms and abilities have been commensal, companions, prey, and hunters, and archaeology must take this fundamental fact – the cohabiting of the world – to heart. Human societies are, there-fore, not so much human as web-of-species societies. Recently, anthropological theory has explored non-modern societies from the perspective of an anthropology of life which incorporates relationality of local humans and non-human animals, a pursuit that is significant for the diverse contributions in this special section of Current Swedish Archaeology: a themed section which deals with past multispecies intra-actions in a long-term perspective.
Highlights
Human-Animal Relationships From a Long-Term PerspectiveKristin Armstrong Oma1 & Joakim Goldhahn2, Humans, like other animals, are inextricably bound to their local complex web-of-life and cannot exist outside of relationally interwoven ecosystems
Throughout history, and around the globe, animals have been attributed with healing powers and used in folk medicine (Estes 1989; Lev 2003; Nóbrega et al 2013; Tillhagen 1958, 1978; Wiseman & Ellis 1996), an area that is relatively unexplored within the field of archaeology
Common for many of the mentioned perspectives, is that they have had a tendency to overemphasize human relations to the material world, and tend to neglect the – more often – sincere engagement and commensal bond that exists between humans and sentient non-human animals, which most obviously have an agency of their own. We find it puzzling that archaeology and anthropology have overlooked such obvious players in the agential life-worlds of humans
Summary
Human-Animal Relationships From a Long-Term PerspectiveKristin Armstrong Oma1 & Joakim Goldhahn2 , Humans, like other animals, are inextricably bound to their local complex web-of-life and cannot exist outside of relationally interwoven ecosystems. In this themed section of the CSA 2020 issue, we have invited archaeologists with different backgrounds and specialist knowledge to ponder what entanglements of human and non-human animals mean for archaeological studies of societies from a deep-time perspective, with a particular focus on human-animal multispecies relationships (Pilaar Birch 2018).
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