Temporalities of human–livestock relationships in the late prehistory of the southern Levant

Abstract

The secondary products revolution is re-appraised here as a critical process in human history that created durable and enduring relationships between people and their livestock. The secondary products revolution is conventionally described in terms of agricultural intensification and a step towards urban development. This process marks a shift from a strategy in which most animals are culled when they reach an optimal weight, which for ruminants occurs relatively early in life, to one in which individual animals are selected for their potential to yield one or more renewable products over the course of life and raised until they can no longer produce secondary products, which tends to occur in adulthood. This new mode of practice placed individual members of two species on an intersubjective ontological plane and moreover, spelled a shift in the temporality of human–livestock relations. This paper draws out the consequences of these ever-closer relationships in the course of human efforts to exploit renewable resources from domesticated animals. In particular, secondary products exploitation extended the lives of lactating female stock, sheep and goats desired for their fibres, oxen engaged in ploughing and donkeys working as pack animals. In this paper, the implications of these new long-term human–animal relationships, which originated and intensified sporadically in different regions of the Near East starting as early as the Neolithic, are discussed in light of the new temporality that attended practices of long-term stock-keeping. This model is examined in light of zooarchaeological, micromorphological and representational evidence for human–livestock relations from the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age of the southern Levant.