Animal-Human Interactions: Becoming, Creating, Relating
Izzy Wisher1 and Kevin Kay2
Abstract
Archaeology has begun to challenge anthropocentric approaches, appreciating the way that relations
cross-cut categories such as human/animal/object and individual/group/species. Relational thinking
challenges the divide between active human agents and passive animal resources. Instead, relational
archaeologies consider the possibility that this boundary was blurred in the past. This enables discussions
of potential transformations between human and animal states; the process of becoming human or
animal; past societies’ dependency on, and orientation around, animals; animal sociality and agency;
and action that defies categories like ‘nature’ or ‘culture’. From this perspective, material culture can
be understood as a medium to negotiate ‘animal-ness’ and ‘human-ness’—or to transcend the binary
altogether. What does an archaeology of animals that embraces these insights look like? This section
explores the multifaceted ways animal-human relations have been explored in a breadth of different
archaeological contexts, from Neanderthal hunting strategies to the conceptualisation of dogs in the
Viking period.
Keywords: Relationality, Post-human, Non-human Agency, Animal Sociality
Becoming with Animals: Relational Provocations in Archaeology
The recent turn to relational thinking in archaeological discourse has provoked a ground-up reappraisal
of the way we discuss and conceive of past behaviours, encouraging more holistic, context-sensitive
approaches (Fowler 2013; Lucas 2012; Shanks 2007). At the root of this movement is a shift in emphasis
from being, in which people, animals, or things can be isolated as stable entities, to becoming, in which
entities emerge through collaborative processes over time (Braidotti 2002; Deleuze and Guattari 1977). In
this view, nothing simply is; the question is how humans and non-humans come into existence and take
on forms, qualities and capacities by interacting with one another. In pursuing this question, a number
of traditional dualisms in Western thinking stand out as suspiciously tidy: mind/body, nature/culture,
human/non-human, male/female. If we are all cyborgs, grafted together out of organisms, objects and
discourses (Haraway 1985; cf. “bodies without organs”, Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 19), then partitioning
human social life off from the ‘natural’ or ‘material’ world can only hobble our understanding. Becoming
steadily cross-cuts these categories.
Archaeologists have generally welcomed the relational turn in the humanities and social sciences,
correctly perceiving its potential to elevate our discipline’s position in the mix (Boivin 2008; Jervis
2018; Olsen 2010). After all, we have spent almost two centuries studying human society through the
lens of material things. In a relational view, we are no longer cast as a derivative discipline, working
from the material dregs of past ‘culture’ to produce a dull approximation of what ethnographers and
historians can more directly study. The potsherds and post holes we lay hands on are not indicators
of “the person behind the artefact” or approximations of an historical text (Hodder 1986); they are
surviving actors from the past in their own right (Fowler and Harris 2015; Lucas 2012). However, because
of archaeology’s traditional attempt to mimic the analytic terms of history and ethnography, our thingoriented discipline carries its fair share of dualistic baggage.
1
2
PhD candidate, Department of Archaeology, Durham University: isobel.c.wisher@durham.ac.uk
PhD candidate, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge: kk510@cam.ac.uk
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For many of us, our first instinct, inculcated deeply from our undergraduate days onward, is to think
about a past that is first and foremost living, human and tacitly male. The pasts of animals, things,
queer people, women and children are cast as secondary; they are insensate resources for (adult cismale) human action, rather than collaborators in the mutual becoming of social worlds. Although the
relational turn and different archaeologies (e.g. queer, feminist, indigenous) have sought to challenge
this engrained perspective of the past (e.g. Arthur 2010; Atalay 2006; Blackmore 2011; Conkey 2003;
Dowson 2000; 2009; Engelstad 1991; González-Ruibal 2016; Nicholas and Watkins 2014; Rutecki and
Blackmore 2016; Weismantel 2013), it has yet to fully permeate into discussions of animal-human
interactions. Animals are all too often ‘othered’; the passive, exploitable resource juxtaposed to,
and often at the mercy of, active human agents. Yet animals, with their active and wilful movement,
diverse personalities, often imposing behaviour and outsized role in stories, beliefs and understandings
globally, have so much more to do with human life than a focus on calories or inert symbolism can
capture. Animal-human interactions are thus fertile ground for relational provocations: deconstructing
traditional conceptions of agency and developing non-dualistic interpretive tools for understanding
‘more-than-human’ becomings in the past (Armstrong Oma 2018; Brittain and Overton 2013, 136; Hill
2013; Whatmore 2006).
Animals in an Anthropocentric Past: Domesticating, Dominating and Depicting
Animals and humans have shaped a shared world throughout the past 2.5 million years (Overton and
Hamilakis 2013, 112). Today, our society is orientated around animal presences, and not only in the
form of our ecologically-disastrous appetite for meat. Animals can be part of our families and cared
for accordingly; their voices radiate throughout even the most urban settlements; they feature in our
art; and our childhood stories are peppered with relatable animal characters. Yet, when it comes to
discussing these familiar agents in the past, we are restrained by a desire for objective description and
a narrow conception of animals’ ‘utility’. Within traditional zooarchaeological approaches, animals
are characterised as percentages in faunal assemblages, MNI’s, represented parts, interpreted calorific
values (Sykes 2014, 2); they become fragmented and stripped of agency. Discussions of past interaction
with these disembodied remnants of animals become limited to presenting animals as controlled,
managed, exploited and commodified by humans.
Archaeological discussions of animals outside of a zooarchaeological context are often equally confined.
Animals are discussed as disembodied symbols, reflecting schematic qualities (e.g. ‘fertility’, ‘power’),
deities, or magical ‘wish fulfilment’ all pinned to human sociality and meaning. They might be “good
to think [with]” (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 89), but the thinking power remains fully human. The intimacy or
depth of animal-human relationships, so often the daily concern for beings of all species in the past, are
rarely seen to inform symbols in more than a superficial way (Armstrong Oma 2010; Lawrence 2019).
The same is true of ‘ritual’ uses of animals: for example, an animal within a burial is a commodity gifted,
sacrificed, or sent through to the afterlife alongside an already-formed person, rather than a participant
in creating a commingled identity that relates to the world in a new way (Conneller 2004, 50). Although
studies of art and ritual have thus come closer to recognising animals as meaningful beings, they too
often stop short of giving animals agency in social becoming.
Traditional approaches to past animal-human interactions consequently paint the past as the work of
human hands and minds exploiting non-human resources, perpetuating the Western nature/culture
divide (Hill 2013, 117). This narrow perspective constrains us to a version of the past with weirdly
motionless and emotionless animals, and moments of intersection between animal and human lives
that are stripped of their complexity and consequence. Observations of animal-human relations in nonWestern societies demonstrate just how W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic)
(Henrich et al. 2010) this perspective of animals is. A breadth of contemporary societies have a
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multifaceted understanding of the agents constructing their world; animals, ancestral spirits, landscape
features, materials and objects can all be understood to be persons (Bird-David 1999; 2006; Hill 2013;
Hornborg 2006; Ingold 2000; Pederson 2001). This is often nuanced and sensitive to the specific cultural
context. For example, within Anishinaabe societies, a certain rock may necessitate one engaging in a
dialogue with it as a non-human person, but another may not, and not all rocks are perceived as being
sentient, only some (Anderson 2017, 135).
Animal-human interactions and relationships within these societies are frequently dialogical, and the
boundary between traditional Western binary categories such as ‘human/animal’ and ‘nature/culture’
are actively blurred. Animals are intertwined with cultural identities and kinship relations: bears can
be “grandfathers” (Willerslev 2013, 51); reindeer can be conceptually interchangeable with children
(Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2012, 53); and male identity may be aligned with birds (Mentore 1993).
In some contexts, animal and human bodies can manifest the same being (Viveiros de Castro 2012);
in others, different beings can converge and commingle in the same body (Mentore 1993; Pedersen
2001; Willerslev 2007). Appreciating this breadth of different ontological understandings of animalhuman interactions highlights how an anthropocentric approach towards animals in the past not only
constrain our interpretations, but may be fundamentally inaccurate in the way past societies related to
animals within their world.
Moving Forward: Appreciating Animal-human Interactions in the Past Through Relational
Thinking
The sheer ethnographic diversity in the way interactions with animals are understood throws
archaeological thinking into sharp relief. Although our working methods (excavation and object
analysis) have always quietly cross-cut dualisms, over the course of interpretation we have tended to
return to the same muted palette of conclusions: that animals are vehicles for human meaning and
resources for making human ends meet, across so much time and space. We know that these are not
the terms of engagement between human and animal lives in most parts of the present (including,
very often, in our own homes). If, as the relational turn provokes us to do, we focus on the interactions
through which humans and animals became as they were, rather than sorting them into ready-made
categories of being, new interpretive possibilities emerge.
A number of archaeologists have embraced the possibilities that come with recognising animals’ diverse
and active roles in past worlds. This movement began in the 1990s and early 2000s (e.g. Anderson 1997;
Conneller 2004; Gardiner 1997) but intensified in the last 15 years as provocative ethnographies and
geographies have expanded our imaginations (e.g. Bird-David 1999; Vivieros de Castro 2004; Whatmore
and Hinchliffe 2006; Willerslev 2007). The emergence of social zooarchaeology re-evaluates the potential
of long-available archaeological methods (and more recent additions like isotope studies) to shed light
on the social systems in which both humans and animals participate. Overton and Hamilakis (2013,
116), in presenting a manifesto for social zooarchaeology, focus on the way past ontologies would have
shaped human intervention in animal lives (and vice versa), ultimately forming the faunal record.
Similarly, Sykes (2014) adapts traditional archaeological analyses of bones and material culture in
order to answer new questions about the active role of animals in shaping society and, in turn, their
own roles within it. Priestley (this volume) and Cousen (this volume) advance these concerns further.
Priestley’s ethnographically-inspired reappraisal of Middle Palaeolithic human-animal relations, so
often discussed as indicators of ‘cognitive modernity’ or the economics of hunting, raises questions
about the kinds of formative interactions across species that defined Neanderthal ontology. Cousen’s
robust zooarchaeological analysis of dog remains from Norse communities across the British Isles and
Scandinavia suggests a vital role of dog ownership and relations of care in constructing different kinds
of person—and different breeds of dog—in early Medieval settlements.
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An alternative approach draws directly on the philosophical roots of relational thinking to explicitly
challenge anthropocentric ideas, and indeed the conceptual division of human and animal beings itself.
Rather than imagining social systems (or ontological ‘worlds’) in which humans and animals both take
active roles, relational philosophy, especially that of Haraway (1985; 2008; 2016) and Braidotti (2002;
2006; 2013), invites us to explore collaborations and affects passing between bodies of many sorts, creating
entities and phenomena greater than the sums of their parts. Armstrong Oma (2013; 2018) discusses this
as mutual becomings; the fact that social worlds are so often made up, not of arrays of things and bodies,
but of moments of touch, care (or harm), recognition (or fear), such that living creatures of all stripes
become as they are in formative, affective moments. This is what Given (2018) calls ‘conviviality’: life
that emerges as it passes through putative boundaries between one substance or body and another,
undercutting our instinct to divide mineral, microbial, animal and human phenomena. Landscapes and
places, soils and tissues, thoughts and reflexes are not strictly human at all: animals (and many others
besides) help mould even our most ‘inner’ dynamics. In this vein, Nikolova (this volume) presents horses
and humans as collaborators in creating ‘heroic’ identities within classical-era Thrace. She discusses
humans and horses as frequently entwined within the performative display of heroism in art, burials
and ritual, such that the Thracian world was shaped around this interspecific dynamic of becoming.
Likewise, Ellis (this volume) explores Iron Age La Tène art through the interweaving of bodies, affects
and agency. Ellis demonstrates how artefacts bearing schematic representations of animals and real
animals (especially cattle) living in close collaboration with humans shaped one another, particularly
with regard to perceived status identities of both animals and humans. Finally, Delia (this volume) traces
the long-term intertwining of animal identities as animals and affects refract between lived experience
and diverse artistic media, generating hybrid mythical beings like dragons along the way. Each of these
studies thus explores the common terrain where art and ritual, daily life and myth and multiple species
collaborate in the production of new, emergent phenomena.
Summary
If the human past is the story of our becoming, then this past as it is conventionally told is altogether
too human. As the studies in this section show, so much of being human in the past was about being with
animals: making kin with them, as Haraway (2016) calls it, and engaging in participatory experiences that
created hybrid phenomena that are so much more than ‘human’ or ‘animal’. From classical sanctuaries
to Palaeolithic rock shelters and from dragons to lap dogs, the new, creative directions developed in this
chapter present intimate insights into past places, minds and material culture by examining animals
and humans relationally.
The results are transformative. Animals are now understood to be agents that participate in the forming
of social worlds in the past. They spark engagement with the lines between human and non-human,
reflecting on the way different kinds of living organisms have been bound up in one another’s becoming,
challenging the boundary between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ and moving past the assumptions we are still
far too quick to apply to these categories. As with the recent approaches to animal-human interactions
mentioned throughout this introduction, they draw on the growing richness of evidence and interpret
this through a new relational lens to understand animals’ active roles in past societies. In different
measures, therefore, the papers in this section bring together a breadth of zooarchaeological evidence,
relational and post-humanist philosophy and thought inspired by non-Western people to present past
animal-human interactions in a new light.
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