Herding Cats

Abstract

‘Interdisciplinarity’ remains a buzzword in archaeology: a divide between science and humanities (Fredengren 2013:54) has precluded the systematic integration of data, methods and vocabulary. Lidén and Eriksson (2013) reviewed misuses of archaeological science by both archaeologists and natural scientists, including the largely performative adoption of each other’s results. Long-standing traditions of natural science (‘science’ henceforth) and humanities in archaeology are at risk of diverging from one another. Beyond entanglement (Fredengren 2021) is a commendable effort to better involve animal studies in archaeology. It inspires reflection on how human-animal relations are coded in key concepts I choose to discuss here. My attempt to bone up on theories developed in animal studies revealed challenges facing the study of animal remains and interdisciplinary archaeology in general. Analysing animal remains in archaeology seems a distinctly positivist, empirical exercise. Whether in search of patterns or testing hypotheses, we invariably study the bodies of dead animals. These data, however, can be too scarce to fit statistical analyses due to past human behaviour, an integral part of the taphonomic process in archaeology (Noe-Nygaard 1987; Magnell 2011) contaminating the purely ‘zoological’ record. Animal bodies are broken up and scattered in culturally different ways making their reconstruction too often impossible. Trying to profit from this inevitable bias led to a ‘human turn’ in my career. Focusing on relationships reveals domesticates to be culturally constructed, endowed with idiosyncratic meanings,