Mutual Becomings in Life and Death: Human and Non-Human Animals in the Mesolithic Danube Gorges
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 16/05/2019

The post-Cartesian ‘Animal Turn’ marked a shift from anthropocentric attitudes to non-human animals as economic  or symbolic  resources to be  exploited, to new understanding of interspecies relations  as mutually impactful and inherently social. Borrowing heavily from ethology and relational ontologies, these  approaches  bear  important  implications  for  studies  of  prehistory  and  cultural  contexts  where hunting  and  fishing  afforded  particular  forms  of  interspecies  interaction.  In  this  paper,  I  focus  on disintegrated and reassembled human and animal bodies in the context of Mesolithic Danube Gorges, and insights they offer into new kinds of entities emerging post-mortem. However, even if death remains materialized and consequently more visible in the archaeological record, it is far from being the only event  in  human  and  non-human  histories  of  engagement.  The  paper  therefore  considers  not  only structurally deposited animal remains, but also living animals as subjects and agents in shaping worlds populated by a multitude of beings.

Ivana Živaljević (BioSense Institute, University of Novi Sad)

TAG Deva 2018
Session: Relational Approaches to Past Hunter-Gatherer Worlds