Animal power: Re-thinking cattle and caprines’ roles in Late Bronze Age political life in the South Caucasus

Abstract

Social zooarchaeology stresses that animals’ role in social and political life is not limited to the merely “economic”. Recent studies of cattle and caprines’ role in the development of inequality, hierarchy, and political authority in Southwest Asia have begun to productively incorporate the “symbolic” or “social” value of animals. Taking an action-oriented anthropological approach to theorizing value offers the possibility of investigating how herd animals’ value(s) shape political life, without making an a priori categorical division between the symbolic and economic. This article examines the zooarchaeological data from two Late Bronze Age sites in the Tsaghkahovit Plain. The analysis reveals diversity in herding practices and an unusual circulation of isolated mandibles and tarsals. Building from previous zooarchaeological engagements with the value of cattle in African pastoralist societies, it argues that the material affordances of living and dead animals make different kinds of spatiotemporal transformations within social life possible. The data indicate that cattle and caprines lived different pre- and post-mortem lives, but that both were valued as sources of reproductive futurity and sources of commensal and mnemonic potentiality, highlighting the multispecies nature of political action in the Late Bronze Age South Caucasus.