A New Way of Looking at the Role of Animals in the Rise of Modern Societies

In Live Stock and Dead Things, Anthropology Professor Hannah Chazin combines zooarchaeology and anthropology to challenge familiar narratives about the role of animals in the rise of modern societies. Conventional views of this process tend to see a mostly linear development from hunter-gatherer societies, to horticultural and pastoral ones, to large-scale agricultural ones, and then industrial ones. Along the way, traditional accounts argue that owning livestock as property, along with land and other valuable commodities, introduced social inequality and stratification. But Chazin raises a provocative question: What if domestication wasn’t the origin of instrumentalizing animals after all?
 
In her new book, Chazin argues that these conventional narratives are inherited from conjectural histories and ignore the archaeological data. In her view, the category of domestication flattens the more complex dimensions of humans’ relationship to herd animals. In the book’s first half, Chazin offers a new understanding of the political possibilities of pastoralism, one that recognizes the powerful role herd animals have played in shaping human notions of power and authority. In the second half, she takes readers into her archaeological fieldwork in the South Caucasus, which sheds further light on herd animals’ transformative effect on economy, social life, and ritual.

Chazin discusses the book with Columbia News, as well as recent reads she recommends and her current projects.

Why did you write this book?

Because my data kept surprising me! I was analyzing animal bones from two ancient sites that we had been excavating in Armenia—and the patterns that I found in the data showing when animals were born and what bones were recovered from various parts of these sites were not what I expected. At first, I found myself struggling to interpret these patterns, because they didn’t match the models and ideas that archaeologists generally use. So in order to be able to go from my data toward an understanding of what people and animals were doing over 3,000 years ago, I needed to ask new questions of my data and interpret it in new ways. Excitingly, this required thinking deeply and carefully about how humans and animals lived together in the past, and about how humans and animals live together in the present.

Can you share some examples from the book of findings that changed your views on the role herd animals have played in shaping human notions of power and authority?

One of the surprising patterns I found in my data was that there were many more jaw bones and ankle bones at these sites than we would have expected. This struck me as odd at first, since these are parts of the body that don’t have a lot of meat, and weren’t being used to make other things like tools or hair pins. So why were there so many of them? While trying to answer that question, I found myself questioning the taken-for-granted difference with contemporary relations between humans and livestock in industrial agriculture versus in traditional forms of pastoralism. Generally, this difference is glossed as the difference between the instrumental value of dead animals (as commodities) in industrial agriculture and the social value of living animals in traditional societies (as not commodities). But reading ethnographies and histories about more recent forms of human-animal relations made me realize that the question of how people valued living and dead animals in the past was more complicated than a simple division between modernity and the past (or the “traditional”).

What we value (and what we devalue) is ultimately political—both because politics shapes what we find valuable, and because politics emerges from struggles over what we prioritize and why (which is ultimately a question of value and values). Animals are a big part of value (and politics) because of the important role they have in shaping the world we live in. Animals do things with us and we do things with them, and since value and politics emerge from what we do in the world (and what we think and say about what we are doing), animals are key to politics. This insight ultimately helped me to figure out how to read the presence of the jaw and ankle bones, and what I was able to say about how they circulated in social life, as traces of political action in the Late Bronze Age. This helped me to write a new story about what was happening 3,000 years ago.

What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

I love Mary Weismantel’s Playing with Things. It is a brilliant book that pushes the boundaries of what archaeology has to say about the past and the world we live in today simultaneously. I found the volume enormously inspiring for writing my own book.

I also enjoyed You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue. Reading this novel was a wild trip: The story and prose are enthralling, comical, tragic, and unnerving, and I’m still thinking about the book weeks later.

What’s next on your reading list?

I just checked out A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan, about the rise and fall of the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920s. It was recommended to me as useful historical context for our current political moment.

What did you teach this semester?

One of my favorite courses, Contemporary Archaeological Theory. I like teaching it because I get to read and discuss recent work in archaeology with PhD students from Columbia, the City University of New York, and New York University. Everyone brings a compelling perspective from their own work and research interests, and the discussions are always lively.

What are you working on now?

I’m in the very early stages of working on my next book, which will examine how new, high-tech methods in archaeology (ancient DNA, isotopic analysis, etc.) are changing how archaeologists tell stories about the past. I’m also planning a trip to Armenia this summer, where I will be analyzing the animal bones from the graves at a Bronze Age necropolis.