Abstract
AbstractThe rise of social zooarchaeology and the so-called ‘animal turn’ in the humanities both reflect a growing interest in the interactions of humans and non-human animals. This comparative archaeological study contributes to this interdisciplinary field by investigating the ways in which successive human cultures employed religion to conceptualise and interact with their ecological context across the longue durée. Specifically, we investigate how the Iron Age, Romano-British, early medieval English, medieval Welsh, and Information Age populations of Great Britain constructed and employed supranatural female figures – Andraste, Diana, Ēostre, St. Melangell, and the modern construct ‘Easter’ – with a common zoomorphic link: the hare. Applying theoretical concepts drawn from conservation ecology (‘shifting baselines’) and the study of religion (‘semantic centres’) to a combination of (zoo)archaeological and textual evidence, we argue that four distinct ‘hare goddesses’ were used to express their congregations’ concerns regarding the mediation of violence between the human in-group and other parties (human or animal) across two millennia.
Highlights
Shifting Baselines and Semantic CentresThe recent rise of social zooarchaeology (Russell, 2011; Sykes, 2014) and the so-called ‘animal turn’ in the humanities (Peterson, 2016; Ritvo, 2007) both reflect a growing scholarly interest in the interactions of humans and non-human animals
The present article contributes to this nexus of archaeological and humanistic study by investigating the different ways in which successive human cultures conceptualised and interacted with their ecological context in a common geographic area
It draws on approaches developed in comparative archaeology, offering what Smith and Peregrine would call an intensive, small-scale, and highly contextualised regional study (2011) that seeks to understand changes to the human- ecological context relationship across the longue durée
Summary
The recent rise of social zooarchaeology (Russell, 2011; Sykes, 2014) and the so-called ‘animal turn’ in the humanities (Peterson, 2016; Ritvo, 2007) both reflect a growing scholarly interest in the interactions of humans and non-human animals. The concept was later adopted more widely, establishing that fisheries scientists were not alone in their unconscious bias: socio-environmental circumstances observed in youth are widely adopted, uncritically, as being ‘native’, ‘natural’, or otherwise positive in opposition to more recent developments, which are generally derided as ‘invasive’, ‘alien’, or generally negative – even where some or all aspects of those initial circumstances are themselves earlier introductions from elsewhere (Coates, 2006; Clavero, 2014; Rotherham & Lambert, 2013; Shackelford et al, 2013; Simberloff et al, 2013; Skandrani, Lepetz, & PrévotJulliard, 2014) Cases of such shifting baselines include the elevation of the grey squirrel as a symbol of the ‘native’ countryside in the British Isles despite its displacement of the red squirrel in the late nineteenth century (Grey Squirrel, 2009; Rushton et al, 2006; Sheehy & Lawton, 2014); and the displacement of earlier British Christmas foodstuffs like beef, mutton, pork, and game by the North American turkey, which is held up as part of the ‘traditional British Christmas’ in modern times (Lauritsen et al, 2018; cf Frawley & McCalman, 2014). It is such workable approximations that we will attempt to establish for successive ‘British hare goddesses’
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