Benjamin S. Arbuckle - Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World

An Introduction

BENJAMIN S. ARBUCKLE AND SUE ANN MCCARTY

The interaction of humans and animals has fascinated scholars for generations and continues to be a productive focus of research across a range of disciplines (). Part of the reason for this continued interest is the degree to which animals are integrated into the fabric of human cultures and thus provide material and symbolic reference points around which cosmologies, cultural practices, aesthetics, and identities are built.

Archaeological approaches to the human-animal relationship, especially those focused on prehistoric periods, have long emphasized the value of using animals to address issues relating to environment and subsistence, particularly regarding the origins of domestic animals ().

The chapters of this volume explore some of these current trends in the social archaeology of human-animal relationships, focusing on the ways in which animals are used to structure, create, support, and even deconstruct social inequalitiesanother major topic of archaeological inquiry. Although representing a diverse range of geographic and spatial contexts, from Neolithic Europe to the complex hunter-gatherers of coastal California, and from the Classic Maya to Colonial West Africa, each of the seventeen chapters in this volume builds on a set of shared themes that target the social rather than the strictly economic roles of animals, and focuses on animals as prominent media for expressing and manipulating social difference. These diverse chapterseach covering important specific topics in its own right, and collectively representing both the Old and the New Worldsshow that although the specific uses of animals may vary through time and space, animals become entangled within human social networks in predictable and consistent ways. These entanglements are so pervasive, so accepted, and so effective that animals often become core symbolic elements that materialize and naturalize social inequalities at a variety of scales extending from households to empires. It is this widespread and intimate association between animals and the creation and reproduction of social relations of inequality that is the shared thematic focus of the wide-ranging chapters of this volume.

The themes explored in this volume derive largely from the works of prominent anthropologists such as Claude Lvi-Strauss, Arjun Appadurai, Jack Goody, and Tim Ingold. This body of work has recognized that people in every cultural context, whether mobile hunter-gatherers or sedentary urbanites, incorporate animals into their cosmological and social systems. :89) famously expressed the idea that animals are good to think, emphasizing that the materiality of animals can effectively be used as repositories for, and to express, a wide range of social information. This theme is especially prominent in the New World chapters of this volume, where contributions by Nawa Sugimaya et al., Leonardo Lpez Lujn et al., H. Edwin Jackson, and Abigail Holeman, for example, focus on the prominent symbolic messages encoded within the structured deposition of specific, often wild, taxa. These messages are saturated with political, ritual, social, and cosmological hierarchies and are often carefully designed to reify and naturalize the prominent inequalities present in complex societies.