Theme:
5. Climate Change and Socioenvironmental Perspectives
Session format:
Discussion session (with formal abstracts)
Title:
Scaling up: Archaeological Science Contributions to Big-picture Narratives on Human-Animal Relations
Content:
Archaeological science is constantly pushing the boundaries of how we understand past human-animal and human-animal-environment relations. The emergence of new techniques in bioarchaeology and environmental archaeology, including lipid biomarkers, environmental DNA, proteomics, isotopic analyses, GIS, and statistics, are providing opportunities to collect new types of data and generate more precise, nuanced interpretations about how humans and animals lived with each other and their environment. But archaeological scientists face a challenge: the expertise and time required to develop new and improved analytical techniques and generate complex datasets means that they often work on and publish single case studies at a time. Amid accusations of not seeing the forest for the trees, what are the most effective ways for scientists to look up, scale up, and integrate their results with big-picture narratives of how humans and animals have interacted with each other and their environment? Such larger-scale narratives are crucial for our broader understanding of past multi-species societies, their resilience (or lack of resilience) in the face of environmental change, and our modelling of sustainable and unsustainable practices. This session invites speakers involved with scaling up and integrating archaeological science so that it contributes to a broader understanding of human-animal relations at national or continental scales, and/or through deep time, or in relation to written sources. Examples of best practice from collaborative interdisciplinary teams, multi-national teams, and big data projects involving published and unpublished archives are particularly welcomed.
Keywords:
Human-animal relations, Bioarchaeology, Environmental archaeology, Integrated archaeological science, Scaling up
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Karen Milek (United Kingdom) 1
Co-organisers:
Kristin Armstrong-Oma (Norway) 2
Affiliations:
1. Durham University, Department of Archaeology
2. University of Stavanger, Museum of Archaeology
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