What Is Animal Prehistory?

This inaugural issue of Animal History offers a welcome opportunity to query the troubled relationship between historical and archaeological scholarship with regard to other animals—how we portray and write about them, how they figure in prevalent ideas of pastness, and what they reveal about our own positionalities and preoccupations. I begin with a basic observation: notwithstanding the recent surge of attention to animal matters in archaeology,¹ these discussions rarely draw on animal history literatures and are predominantly framed as part of a “multi-species” venture.² There is at present no “animal prehistory,”³ in other words, to complement the now well-established field of animal history⁴ and to build new animal-oriented alliances across the historical sciences. But why is this the case? And what can this situation tell us about animal archaeologies as they currently take shape? Attending to such questions is not merely a scholastic exercise but can play an important role in strengthening and revising the “animal lens”⁵ in both disciplines, thereby nurturing the ambition of a truly transepochal animal-oriented research program at the intersection of history and archaeology. Such a research program comprising and re-articulating what is sometimes also called “shallow” and “deep history”⁶ is needed to satisfy some of the broader ambitions and goals of the original “animal turn”⁷ across the humanities, and may also help to better engage with a range of thorny problems that plague the study of animal pasts.

In what follows, I take a critical look at multi-species archaeology and the opportunities, challenges, and limits of animal-oriented scholarship in order to distill the contours of what may be termed “animal prehistory.” The question of animal prehistory is brought up not because there is need to coin yet another animal archaeology term but rather to draw attention to shared sensibilities and complications vis-à-vis engaging with animal pasts at the history-archaeology nexus. I argue that some of these issues are currently not at the center of archaeological attention, rendering the idea of animal prehistory a useful foil to unearth and belabor them. I am particularly critical of archaeologists’ tendency to table animal archaeologies in continuity to—or as a logical progression of—particular kinds of zooarchaeology and the related proclivity to picture such archaeologies primarily as projects of positivist science, with little consideration of animal archaeologies as a form of literature and critical history-writing. My contestation is that animal archaeologies, by attending chiefly to zooarchaeology as well as posthuman, ontological, and feminist perspectives devised by scholars foremostly interested in the present and future of how we think about and interact with other animals, seem to have largely lost sight of the very problem of the “historical animal”⁸ itself. Making space for such animal historicity, however, is necessary to evade the pitfalls of presentism, and opens up a critical space of interdisciplinary exchange between historians and archaeologists. This paper is my humble attempt to work toward such a space of productive debate and interaction.

Although this is not the place to present a detailed history of archaeological thought with regard to nonhuman animals, the way in which animals have recently come to the fore in archaeology is notable and merits a few brief comments. Already on the linguistic surface, animals are pivoted in a manner contrasting recent developments in historical scholarship: while “animal history” draws attention to animals as subjects and potential protagonists of historical processes, terms such as “animal archaeology” or “animal prehistory” as I use them here are difficult to spot in the archaeological literature. Moreover, the term “animal archaeology” is readily equated with “faunal archaeology” or “zooarchaeology”—the focused study of animal remains from archaeological contexts⁹—thus conflating an archaeology reconfigured by the animal turn with a long-standing subdisciplinary endeavor rooted in particular sources and research methods.¹⁰ This confusion—rarely articulated in written form but frequently voiced at academic conferences and symposia—on the animal turn itself, often viewed as superfluous for archaeology, is said to have factored in animals and their behaviors since its disciplinary beginnings. The term which in the last couple of years has gained archaeological traction instead is “multi-species archaeology,” and I believe this is no mere coincidence: “multi-species” is much less emphatic and provocative than “animal (pre)history” and, at first glance, also much humbler in its ambitions.

“Multi-species” immediately places emphasis on the diversity of life and thereby de-centers human projects but, paradoxically, also those of other animals. The animal question is explicitly broached in a broader ecological rather than historical perspective. As Suzanne Pilaar Birch has put it, “Multispecies archaeology can really be viewed as archaeo-ecology, as an archaeology of life which understands the past through networks and interactions rather than stochastic events and places” (emphasis added).¹¹ Such a multi-species archaeology is almost trivial in its insistence on the interconnectedness of life and advocates for a close-to-literal understanding of “multi-species” as the interactions of species in the past, illuminated for example through the study of food webs, co-mobilities, and niche dynamics. Even though Pilaar Birch also briefly engages with multispecies ethnography and selected work in human-animal studies (HAS), the vision of multi-species archaeology she sketches clearly stands in the tradition of natural history—humans appear as yet another organism in a given ecosystem.¹² This archaeo-ecology shares features with life-scientific methods and understandings of the role and place of other animals in the past; it also voices a critique on the wider animal humanities that is rarely noticed: Pilaar Birch decidedly notes that “although a ‘multispecies ethnography’ and human-animal studies offer many useful insights, they are not enough. It is essential to take as inspiration a much broader compass from the earth and life sciences that challenges our notions of evolution and life on earth.”¹³ I will return to this supposed challenge below as it largely defines the present discourse in animal archaeology.

Another short note on typography: I have opted to refer to “multi-species” here because this is a common rendering of the term in the archaeological literature¹⁴ and the hyphenation may tell us more than meets the eye. It not only defuses the double implication of “multispecies” in Donna Haraway’s¹⁵ sense—as both critique and extension of the troubled species concept in different hetero-topological worlds—it may also be taken to suggest that species-centeredness (or speciesism) can be addressed simply by adding a plethora of other (nonhuman) species to the totality of analysis. “Multi-species” can in fact be read to retain species separateness—contra Haraway—and may thus bear stronger conceptual kinship with multi-species ecology, which notably also features a hyphen, than multispecies studies in anthropology and the environmental humanities. Multi-species ecology is part of the broader endeavor of community ecology and typically concerned with population-level species interactions and types of coexistence,¹⁶ echoing Pilaar Birch’s construal of multi-species archaeology in significant ways and putting its genealogy into further substantive context.

The second strand of multi-species thinking in archaeology complements this genealogy but similarly lacks significant import from historical scholarship. This body of literature includes Yannis Hamilakis and Nick Overton’s initial proposal for a multi-species archaeology,¹⁷ Oliver Harris and Craig Cipolla’s prominent textbook coverage thereof,¹⁸ as well as the seminal work of scholars such as Erica Hill,¹⁹ Kristin Armstrong Oma,²⁰ and Brian Boyd.²¹ Taken together, this scholarship represents a confluence of emancipatory work, centering nonhuman animals and other beings in archaeological theory and analysis. Importantly, the term “multi-species” is very differently understood and mobilized here when compared to the “archaeo-ecology” championed by Pilaar Birch and others. Harris and Cipolla muster backgrounds in posthumanism, new materialism and ontological archaeology, and are variously influenced by Indigenous critiques.²² Yannis Hamilakis and Brian Boyd are critical theorists and draw heavily from post-colonial literatures, including (neo)feminist theory, critical animal studies, critical heritage studies, and migration studies. Erica Hill’s animal gaze, albeit often incorporating ethnohistorical sources, is primarily influenced by human-animal studies and cultural anthropology. Ian McNiven’s zooarchaeology, finally, can be added to this list as it is widely recognized as a form of Indigenous archaeology.²³ This scholarship is heterogenous in its details but crystallizes various counter-archaeologies of human-animal relations, whether foregrounding “agency” (Hill), sensory resonance (Hamilakis/Overton), “assemblages” (Harris/Cipolla), “co-becomings” (Armstrong Oma), or power relations (Boyd). Animal specificity is rarely theorized in these counter-archaeologies, however, and they often carry on the legacies of what has been called “relational”²⁴ and “symmetrical” archaeology.²⁵

It is central to these approaches, I believe, that they are fueled by a deeply critical orientation toward Western humanism—what Richard Grusin has attempted to capture in the figure of the “nonhuman turn”²⁶ in the 21st-century West—and thus variously take stock of the politics of the present. Harris and Cipolla are quite clear about this when they say that “archaeologists need to find a way of discussing humans, plants and animals that doesn’t hide our interest in human beings, but equally avoids separating them off as a uniquely special entity in the world. We need a flat ontology, in other words.”²⁷ This ontological bearing—the talk of “flat ontologies,” for example—is rarely historicized and typically presented as a problem of how we think about and analyze animals in general. Nerissa Russell has rightly criticized this generalization and argued that tearing down the distinction between “wild” and “domestic” animals entirely may mask important historical transformations as such categorizations gained human significance,²⁸ yet she has also qualified the issue as a problem of “pigeonholing” and in other places framed it as a mere clash of perspectives premised on discrete vs. gradual boundaries at the human-animal interface.²⁹ What remains is an overriding difficulty to align the contextual ambition to map and interrogate other animals in their historical situatedness with the ontological critique of modernist modes of thinking about them. This discrepancy indeed risks re-introducing yet another universalism—whether “flat” or “rhizomatic”—which is arguably of limited value given archaeologists’ interests in how various animals have fared and how human-animal relationships were configured in different times and places. Through the backdoor, critique of this sort that is exclusively rooted in the politics of the present without gesturing beyond it, or at least developing a dedicated historical outlook, can easily contribute to yet another manifestation of progressivist or “Whig” history—a history that presents binary practices of ordering and understanding the world as anachronistic—as a symptom of modernity—and thus as a priori inadequate and flawed.

Archaeology has cultivated an opaque and often-ambivalent relationship with humanism, and this is clearly linked to its promise to elucidate the human—the Anthropos—as an evolutionary singularity, coevally unifying all of humanity and explaining its culture-historical diversity. As Stefanos Geroulanos has highlighted, the very idea of “prehistory” can indeed not be detached from the historical project of modernity and, as such, served as a prime vehicle to legitimate and reproduce particular views of particular presents.³⁰ Archaeology, especially the archaeology of human origins, has therefore never escaped the need to frame, negotiate, and re-calibrate nature-culture relations,³¹ so that the Descartes-centered narrative of humanism vs. naturalism often invoked to motivate the turn to animals never really applied to archaeology as a discipline. Instead, archaeology seems to have developed its characteristic form of practiced humanism based on a dedicated engagement with the human animal, incentivizing the idea that human exceptionalism is rooted in a specific but evolved bodily condition, extended or not. Archaeology, seen from this perspective, has so arguably contributed to the consolidation of what Kay Anderson and Colin Perrin have identified as the dominant science-based understanding of human exceptionalism³² precisely because of, and not despite of, the foregrounding of human animality.³³ Archaeology’s deep-running obsession with the animal side of human nature is well reflected in its selective recruitment and celebration of other animal sciences, especially primatology, which has, paradoxically, only furthered the promotion and normalization of a “logic of lack” vis-à-vis other animals, and so merely reinforced tropes of human exceptionality, uniqueness, and nature transcendence.³⁴ This orientation is most apparent in publications in journals such as Evolutionary Anthropology. Archaeology thus clearly, and pervasively, remains troubled by humanist goals and ambitions.

The situation is deeply contradictory as archaeologists often consider themselves as considerably “less” humanist than many of their colleagues in the humanities—for example, with regard to the weight attached to the universal figure of a supposedly rational, moral, and self-sufficient human detached from nature (Homo clausus³⁵). Archaeology not only conjures an influential research tradition rendering human agency fairly limited and framing a deeply impersonal past governed by powerful external forces, including environment and climate change; it has also, in the view of many scholars at least, traditionally cemented animal behavior as a key context of past human behavior, as is supposedly well documented in the history of zooarchaeology.³⁶ Yet I believe that such deflection of the original critique linked to the animal turn—namely, to recognize human sociality, culture, and history as a more-than-human affair—severely misses the point as taking animals and animality more seriously is not merely a question of the importance of animals as subjects of empirical study. This is why multi-species archaeology or “animal prehistory” cannot simply be (social) zooarchaeology 2.0, even though the latter’s initial framing as an emphatic response to narrow economic perspectives on human-animal relationships may be taken to suggest so.³⁷

The trouble with humanism, in this optic, then, is really not about the tendency to take the human as a starting point or even a nodal point of analysis at all, yet this appears to be the focus of current debate in archaeology, irrespective of whether the animal question is framed in terms of archaeo-ecology (Pilaar Birch) or the posthuman (Boyd). Brian Boyd’s “Archaeology and Human–Animal Relations: Thinking Through Anthropocentrism” illustrates this quite well as the problem of human-centeredness is squarely put front and center in how to interrogate the relationship between humans and animals in the archaeological record. It is telling, I would argue, that anthropocentrism is primarily discussed here through the lens of critical animal studies and that it is cast in yet another dualism: as ethical-normative vs. ontological anthropocentrism, with speciesism being a variant of the former.³⁸ What is confusing about these debates, as Boyd notes himself, is that a fundamental form of anthropocentrism can, of course, never be avoided as all research is conducted by and for human knowing subjects.³⁹ A “God’s-eye view” of reality, or a “view from nowhere,” is therefore impossible by definition,⁴⁰ but is not an argument against the possibility to enrich, complicate, and unsettle what we consider the “default” or “normal” gaze on other animals. As noted above, animal and multispecies scholarship frequently take issue with sedimented ideas of human exceptionality, as these underpin authoritative “ontostories”⁴¹ such as those orbiting the becoming of our species⁴² and the process of animal domestication,⁴³ but these ideas register complex and non-trivial relationships with different anthropocentric positionalities.⁴⁴ It is therefore of critical importance to neatly and explicitly distinguish between epistemological and ontological goals of animal archaeology, including why we talk about “ontology” in these contexts in the first place.

We may, for example, interrogate the dominant ontologies of the present, and how they figure in our scholarly thinking about other animals, how we engage with them in our daily lives, and how research frameworks and protocols privilege particular observations, arguments, insights, and perspectives, while closing off others. This can also include critical attention to the kinds of “implicit ontologies”⁴⁵ perpetuated by animal archaeology as a body of literature and discursive force. It does not immediately follow, however, that the question of ontology can be universalized, for instance, by assuming that the many identified “pathologies” of modern zoo-ontologies must be “rolled back” to reveal a “purer” and more adequate image of past animals and human-animal relationships. This is also the trouble with the call for “flat ontologies” understood as an ontological thesis about how the world (always) was “in actual fact,”⁴⁶ as this certifies precisely the kinds of ontostories animal archaeologies should be critically engaging with (and arguably pushing back against). “Flattening” the ontological plane, perhaps paradoxically so, was therefore never really an ontological maneuver but a deeply epistemological one. The goal is typically to level the conceptual playing field in order to open up a maximally inclusive space of historical possibilities, precisely without closing off any alterities or commonalities.⁴⁷ Yet many animal archaeologies of more recent date appear to locate, often in wide-ranging explorations, what sort of ontological lens should best be adopted in order to examine the past.⁴⁸ This not only risks coating fundamentally epistemological questions in the logic of ontology, it also easily bequeaths a situated diagnostic of the present and so “domesticates” the past. The link readily established between anthropocentrism and ontology in archaeological discourse, in other words, promotes recognition merely of superficial difference—difference as antithesis to how animal archaeologies and the literatures they draw on at present conceive of the here and now, and how we have come to relate to other animals in this moment. This, I suggest, amounts to nothing more than yet another presentist projection of what the past ought to be.

The overarching anthropocentrism that has befallen archaeology is therefore not ethical-normative, nor is it ontological: it is historical. Ignorance of the historical (and cultural) dimensions of animal pasts is anthropocentric because in classical humanist terms, only humans are candidate historical actors,⁴⁹ and accordingly only they can be said to both make and have history in any meaningful way.⁵⁰ Nonaccidentally, these tropes are similarly deeply inscribed in much of the history of zooarchaeology. The tendency to universalize the human-animal problem as ontological glosses over the very possibility of historical mutability and contingency, with regard to both the relevant inter-relationalities and the behaviors and perspectives of the other animals in question. I will recount below that the category of the “animal” itself is fruitfully destabilized by such historicity, but not always in the same way and to the same effects, and sometimes perhaps not at all, and this is for the better. This historical condition of the animal itself—Susan Nance’s “historical animal”⁵¹—adds to the difficulties of adopting the perspectives of animals and probing their sensibilities, a challenge critically received by many animal historians.⁵² Yet the problem, I would argue, is not so much that we cannot hope to fully escape our own vantage points as humans, as strategic approximation, immersion, and speculative simulation would nevertheless offer potentially useful insights; rather, a key problem is that we cannot assume that such animal perspectives and sensibilities are historically stable, neither can we assume that today’s knowledge of the animals in question is particularly useful or generalizable. The most potent anthropocentrism to dabble with may thus be archaeologists’ lack of engagement with the animal as changeable. It is here, I suggest, that archaeology’s humanist legacy shines brightest.

Markus Schroer’s geosociology asserts that “to define humans means to define the wrappings [Umhüllungen], the life support systems, the effective environment, enabling them to breathe—precisely what humanism has omitted to do” (my translation).⁵³ This critique of the “naked” human⁵⁴ extends Elias’s adamant attack on the “(en)closed” human (Homo clausus)⁵⁵ to revise our apprehension of human life in terms of not just human-human interdependencies but the many human-nonhuman entanglements that frame, mediate, and promote the sociohistorical conditions of the always-situated and ever-evolving human. In concert with scholars such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing,⁵⁶ Schroer puts the finger on the problematic humanist fantasy of the Anthropos as a constant and singular, instead foregrounding ongoing “metamorphoses” and “modifications” in the face of changing externalities.⁵⁷ As Pascal Eitler has pointed out, such reconfiguration of the human implies a decidedly “genealogical” perspective in which even the bodily human, the human animal, is never given or “out there,” but co-made through its unfolding engagements and involvements with the nonhuman.⁵⁸ In fact, “human” and “animal” must so be recognized as historical products of continuous negotiative interactions rather than as categories transcending their situated becoming. A significant but often overlooked implication of this important critique of humanist tropes—its flipside, if you will—is its largely analogous bearing on the human-defining externalities. These externalities must be equally unpacked in their situatedness and heterogeneity in order to overcome an undifferentiated attendance to nature as an anonymous super-agent or black box. Critique of the Anthropos therefore also calls for a poignant critique of the animal. I suggest that this is the central, although also most paradoxical, import of animal history, explaining its limited resonance with and reception in archaeological discourse. Animal history, similar to animal prehistory,⁵⁹ celebrates “the animal” by coevally centering and questioning “it.”

In my view, this is really the crux of animal-oriented inquiry, and arguably the place where animal archaeologies can benefit the most from close engagement with animal history. What is needed is more archaeological attention to and sensibility of animal specificity, and this is why it is not enough to simply foreground animals as subjects of empirical investigation. In order to take animals seriously, to “turn” to them, or to adopt an “animal lens,”⁶⁰ we must be ready to critically disassemble the conceptual frameworks we routinely muster to address and examine them. This hearkens back to Cary Wolfe’s insistence that the question of the animal necessitates articulation of two projects: the first centered on questions of “content, thematics, and the objects of knowledge,” the second concerning “the level of theoretical and methodological approach.”⁶¹ Wolfe goes on to suggest that in literary animal studies, and perhaps the study of culture more generally, the situation is complicated by a schism between “scholars committed primarily to matters of history” and “scholars committed primarily to matters of theory.”⁶² Animal archaeologies, I would argue, are caught up in this “schism” without recognizing it and, by foremostly attending to matters of general theory—mainly through the prism of ecology/evolution or posthumanism—have neglected the specific historical challenges of their project(s). This situation is perhaps not surprising given that especially deep time archaeologies have long privileged “evolution” over “history,”⁶³ but its consequences for animal research are far-reaching and not yet fully understood. All of this leads me to a provocative conclusion: if animal prehistory fails to cultivate a decidedly critical, conceptual, and historical commitment, it betrays its very purpose.

This more-than-empirical project must involve exposing the thicket of colonial framings vis-à-vis our scientific understandings of “the animal,”⁶⁴ but it also calls for open-ended conceptual work on the implications of the “embedded” animal. Drawing on Karl Polanyi’s⁶⁵ influential theorization of embeddedness, the animal is naturally pluralized while both animal behavior and evolution are enabled and constrained by conditions untethered to the animals themselves. This admission in many ways closes the circle as we consequently need to “define the wrappings [Umhüllungen], the life support systems, the effective environment, enabling [animals] to breathe”⁶⁶ in order to close in on the historical animal. These situated wrappings importantly include humans, embedded in their own wrappings. I have elsewhere proposed to understand these wrappings as contextually assembled Uexküllian animal Umwelten with important repercussions for animal behavior and cognition, and that archaeology may be uniquely positioned to elucidate and qualify them.⁶⁷ Following this logic, even strategically adopting a zoocentric outlook thus returns us to the human and the historical conditions shaping coupled human-animal systems. As we increasingly come to terms with the difficult fact that humans cannot be separated from their nonhuman natures,⁶⁸ so should we recognize that animals, too, cannot be separated from their nonanimal natures. Dominik Ohrem has gestured toward this issue as the basic problem of “world-openness”⁶⁹ in human-animal studies: creaturely co-habitation emerges as a problem of the coming together, fostering both limitations and possibilities, of human-world and animal-world relations.⁷⁰ I would like to refer to this more broadly as the parity principle of animal-oriented inquiry in the historical sciences, and animal archaeologies are advised to take careful stock of it.

We can also resist the classical humanist tendency to essentialize and thereby monolithicize the animal by taking up Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between bios (βíος) and zoé (ζωή). Drawing on Attic philosophy of nature, Agamben points out that bios refers to the “form or way of life proper to an individual or group,” while zoé denotes “the simple fact of living common to all living beings.”⁷¹ Animals are always caught up in both the conditionalities of biological life in general (zoé) and the specific demands of living such life for particular individuals and groups thereof in particular historical contexts (bios). Understood as a key locus of negotiating animal being and becoming, bios-zoé relations can thus be read as a specific variant of the structure-agency dynamic. Historical animals are defined not only by their changing externalities but always also by their own organismal structures and the possibilities and limitation incurred by them. This is the Gibsonian animal whose plural agency is primarily determined by the affordances (possibilities/invitations to act) emerging at the intersection of specific, individual organisms and their life-worlds.⁷²

The organismal structure, including body plans, dietary constraints, and cognitive predispositions of animals, is therefore a key mediating factor of their behavior in general and can be added as an intermediate level of organization between Agamben’s rendition of bios and zoé. Organismal structure is difficult to pin down and generalize, however, as it can differ within populations and even change over the course of an individual’s life history, or biography. The modern species concept (speciēs), derived from Linnaean taxonomy, can be understood as an exceptionally influential attempt to capture and systematize such differences in organismal structure across the tree of life, although notably prioritizing phenotypical bodily features and qualities. The species concept is thus reprieve and curse at the same time: it facilitates specifying some conditionalities of zoé but it also denies the even more specific claims of bios, notably its historicity.

The deployment of “species” as observational and interpretive units can thus both benefit and obstruct the study of the embedded animal. This “species problem” poses considerable challenges for both animal historians and animal archaeologists as it requires integrating knowledge of species-level animal behavior and ecology while remaining critical about species as the default, and sometimes exclusive, lens to animal pastness. The problem of the historical animal thus calls for a multi-level approach to animalness, with the need to identify and examine ever new context-dependent animal categories. Erica Hill, writing about the entanglement of birds and burial practices in the historic Indigenous Western Arctic, argues that in order to “better understand how Ipiutak and other people of the past engaged with birds, traditional osteological skills ought to be accompanied by those of the naturalist.”⁷³ Recent work in animal history makes similar reference to the animal behavioral sciences, especially ethology.⁷⁴ I would argue that such wide-ranging engagement is indeed urgently needed to heed animal specificities, and it is here that archaeology provides an interesting “trading zone”⁷⁵ of ideas and concepts due to its focal disciplinary position at the juncture between the humanities and natural sciences, notably paleoecology.

Yet again, the challenge is to negotiate species-level generalities that these sciences maintain to have uncovered with evidence illustrating the limitations of such apprehensions. Animal scholarship in history and archaeology should therefore be particularly attentive to the nascent “organismal turn”⁷⁶ in the biological and evolutionary sciences which takes individual organisms and their (zoo-)agency as a starting point and highlights behavioral plasticity, behavioral novelty, as well as organism-environment couplings and feedbacks. In addition, there is now growing appreciation of varyingly stable animal “ecotypes”—patterned organism-environment couplings—that also showcase intricate linkages between animal behavior, morphology, genetics, and the histories thereof, in particular populations.⁷⁷ A prominent example is the different orca ecotypes, some of which are now discussed in terms of their potential status as distinct species.⁷⁸ The orca case is particularly instructive as ecotype-formation in this marine keystone predator is likely human-mediated and deeply entangled with global climate change,⁷⁹ illustrating the historicity and contingency of present-day orca behavior.

The orca example helps us to appreciate the fundamental paradox of the “ethologization” of animal history-writing: ethology and other “hard” animal sciences muster a limited temporal scope of observations on how animals operate in their environments and evolve, and the bulk of knowledge clearly derives from (near-)Anthropocene conditions. Ethological knowledge therefore encodes its own historicisms. It simply is an open (empirical) question to what extent such presentist knowledge about animals can be generalized, and in what ways it can inform accounts of past animals. The answer may well differ with regard to different animals and different aspects of their being and becoming. Bioarchaeological studies of animal feeding behaviors and habitat preferences often reveal considerable plasticity in these domains,⁸⁰ and a long-term study of red deer ecology, for example, indicates that woodland adaptations in this species may be a very recent, late Holocene phenomenon.⁸¹ Such findings can help animal historians contextualize and calibrate their own interrogations, but they should also remind animal archaeologists that some long-standing zooarchaeological approaches may no longer be tenable. Extrapolating the detailed texture and composition of local and regional environments based on the presence and absence of certain animal taxa is, for example, a deeply Cartesian praxis premised on the basic stability of animal-environment relations and, at the very least, requires animal-specific reconsideration.⁸² Traditional ethology, too, produced much of its knowledge through a humanist lens of the instinctual, innate, and automatic-responsive animal cast broadly as machine, prominently reflected in the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz.⁸³ Both animal history and archaeology would therefore do well to take stock of such received constellations of knowledge without reproducing their animal presuppositions. This is why researchers interested in animal pastness cannot content themselves with simply “integrating” knowledge on animals; they need to develop and cultivate a critical competence of animals as situated and agentive beings: what I would like to call transdisciplinary zoo-literacy.

Approached from this perspective, Donna Haraway’s⁸⁴ reconfiguration of the species concept really motivates not merely a critique of the taxonomization of animal-oriented inquiry but makes space for a whole new universe of significant animal categories to throw new light on the interlaced being and becoming of past animals, with or without reference to human externalities. Importantly, however, this problem cannot be reduced to a question of ontology; it remains deeply epistemological and calls for ongoing conceptual-empirical dialogue. In sync with many others who have said this before, I have recently argued that “wildhood” is one of the many influential humanist misnomers to make sense of animal behavior in the deep past and effectively blocks investigations of animal agency and behavioral novelty as these often crystallize below the species threshold.⁸⁵ Animal archaeologists are in a unique position to deconstruct such concepts by directly investigating changing animal behaviors in varying human environments,⁸⁶ showing that figurations of the historical animal can indeed be traced on the level of the population, group, or even the individual. In this context, it has been suggested that (paleo-)synanthropy offers a privileged window into this type of “world-openness” of animals, exposing how animals adjust their behaviors in response to historically specific opportunities catered by their human co-inhabitants.⁸⁷ Such emerging perspectives can be productively aligned with current concerns in animal history, for example, with regard to “more-than-human urbanities” or questions of “liminality.”⁸⁸ But they also open up the floodgates, indicating how little we actually know about animal diversity.

As I write this, more and more critique of the Linnaean animal is mounted from within the sciences of animal behavior, as observational evidence increasingly suggests substantial below-species-level differences in animal lifestyle, interpreted as cultural variation and now documented across diverse genera.⁸⁹ The impact of such zoocultures on the making of the past is rarely taken into account, even though a proper and conceptually dedicated “cultural history” of animals seems increasingly accessible.⁹⁰ Engaging with “embedded” animals in the sense sketched above thus also brings up the crucial question of how to adequately describe and understand the specificities of past animal cultural realities. To account for such historical specificities may well require drawing on sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology, as argued by John Hartigan engaging with the specific “world-openness” of Galician horses vis-à-vis their human wrappings,⁹¹ hence further destabilizing the human-animal boundary in terms of disciplinary competences and authorities.

This culturalist critique of animal behavior only adds to the broader significance of historical evidence on and the contextualization of animal performativity, as zoocultures cannot be assumed to be ahistorical constructs. All of this reinforces the need to take seriously the deep-running conceptual challenges of animal pastness, namely to center the fundamental problem of zoo-difference. Animal scholarship needs to overcome renditions of the animal as a difference category (differentia specifica), as an antonym to the human, and instead re-locate difference within “the animal” itself. This may also mean re-directing scholarly attention from animal bodily appearances as foregrounded in taxonomic logic and species-thinking to the problem of what animal bodies can do. This framing is not incidentally consonant with how feminist disability researchers position and engage with human bodies.⁹² The crux, I would insist, is to overcome the tendency to describe animal bodies as lacking something. Difference is not deficiency—a key issue that touches upon how we conceptualize the “normal” animal or what is “species typical.” I would argue that it is indeed no coincidence that interpretive concepts such as “keystone” animals, securing species-level capabilities but also grouping animals oblique to species differences, have become increasingly popular in animal archaeologies in recent years.⁹³ These concepts respond to the need to attend to the specificities of animal bodily functionalities, in a similar way as human bodies are now pivoted in feminist-materialist disability studies.⁹⁴ Looking at animal bodies not as fixed and deficient but as differently-abled and relational goes a long way and opens up new avenues for the study of past zoo-agency and human-animal co-habitation.

Animal archaeologies gain increasing prominence and importance within the discipline, yet archaeological theory, as we have seen, has largely evaded key questions of history and historicity. Animal archaeologies currently revolve around two larger projects—one “archaeo-ecological,” the other “ontological” and “posthuman” in orientation; yet both projects have largely neglected to examine their own presuppositions of what animals are and how animals are enfolded in (deep) history. These presuppositions have less to do with traditional forms of (Western) anthropocentrism, which archaeologists have emphatically started to tackle. Rather, they are linked to a broader animal paradox in archaeology—namely, that although archaeologists concern themselves with the study of change in the past, they have conceived of animals as ahistorical and largely stable contributors to this past. I suggest this is not because archaeology has little to contribute to the fundamental problems posed by the “historical animal,” quite to the contrary, as I have tried to show here. Archaeologists are simply not sufficiently aware of and literate in relevant discussions on these matters, and this in part has to do with a lack of scholarly interaction with animal history. Pivoting animal archaeologies not only as a multi-species project but also as “animal prehistory” may help to counteract this issue, as centering the term “animal” requires us to attend to the domain specificities of the same, and “prehistory” secures continuity with history.⁹⁵ The shared discursive space which then becomes available at the archaeology-history interface promises to be productive and holds hitherto untapped possibilities to reconfigure historical and archaeological scholarship alike.

In response to baseline critique of historians’ ability to recover the “historical animal” based on essentially human-mediated sources by scholars such as Erica Fudge,⁹⁶ animal historians have recently expanded their repertoire of source materials, to include zooarchaeological remains and material culture.⁹⁷ For archaeology, too, it is time to move “beyond making the case that animals mattered in the past and explore how [archaeologists] can uncover and interpret traces of historical animals.”⁹⁸ I argue that this problem is differently configured in archaeology, but in addressing it, animal archaeologists can still learn a lot from historians and simultaneously proffer new perspectives for them. To begin with, many archaeological sources are much less human-centered than traditional historical sources such as textual documents. The “search problem”⁹⁹ of animal history—how to find other animals in human-targeted sources—tends to be much less pronounced in archaeology as the materiality of animals and the consequences of their behaviors are key features, and often are formative, of the archaeological record,¹⁰⁰ and archaeologists, with the help of a large battery of colleagues deploying natural science methodologies, routinely reconstruct even the living spaces of animals as these are shared or significantly overlap with human taskscapes. Aided by paleogenetics, archaeologists have recently even begun to chart the presence of animals in the absence of their bodies through animal genetic material left behind in past soil matrices.¹⁰¹ The archaeological sciences now employ a multitude of methods to directly examine animal diets, mobility, ecology, demography, and the bodily constitutions of animals. Many of these sources are animal sources by definition.

In large part because of this omnipresence of animal traces in the archaeological record—their evidential banality—“writing animals back into history” has not been considered a problem in the discipline. Yet interestingly, archaeologists, just like historians, and to recall Susan Nance’s poignant diagnostic, are traditionally equally trained to “edit animals [themselves] out of [the] analysis.”¹⁰² An example is social zooarchaeology’s openly one-sided engagement with animals to understand their uses and roles in past human societies,¹⁰³ another is archaeology’s long-standing obsession with taphonomy and site formation processes to parse out nonhuman agencies and eliminate them from the equation. By focusing on the question of anthropogenic origin, manipulation, or utilization, archaeologists, similar to historians before them, have almost entirely overlooked the possibility that the archaeological record itself ultimately is a human-animal co-construction. Some animal archaeologists have recently started to work on this issue, reinterpreting and reconsidering in detail how animals insert themselves into deep history and how their bodies and body parts—what may be called “zoomaterialities”—actively shape the material record.¹⁰⁴ Embedded animals are now also argued to directly contribute to the formation of “zoovisualities,” with traces of animal action sometimes deliberately being integrated into as well as motivating specific kinds of human visual culture.¹⁰⁵ These nascent animal archaeologies resonate with voices in animal history to factor in the historical efficacy of living animals, their associated materialities, and varied, sometimes precarious beings-in-the-world.¹⁰⁶ Importantly, animal archaeologies may thus provide animal historians with additional incentives and possibilities to revise their apprehension of the historical archive itself.

Another important research perspective emerging within archaeology broaches the coupled histories of humans, animals, and ecosystems. This ecosystem lens brings into focus how humans and animals assemble shared niches and how their respective impacts on ecosystem structure and functionality shape each other’s long-term histories.¹⁰⁷ This brings us full circle as such perspectives pivot multi-species assemblages to the center of attention, engendering alternative structure-agency dynamics with long-term directionalities transcending the projects of the involved human and nonhuman agents. Archaeology’s promise to elucidate the material-semiotic generativity of such dynamics should be of interest to animal historians, who have similarly turned to ecosystems as relevant contexts of historical investigation.¹⁰⁸ Yet the ecosystem lens also powerfully challenges our very concept of history and what it may mean to write human-animal histories. Because of the geographic fragmentation and distinct temporality of many of their sources and observations, archaeologists may primarily contribute to macro-history (“global history”), millennial-scale structural history (“big history”), or what Edmund Russell has called “evolutionary history.”¹⁰⁹ The animal question accordingly brings us back to some of the basic challenges of animal history-writing as a human praxis: it does not necessarily change what informs our histories, but it challenges how we write them. The same observation applies to the sources: animal archaeologies do not necessarily engage with entirely new sources, but they may compel us to read and interpret them in fundamentally new ways to help us “see,” that is, to make visible, specific (deep-)historical animals. It is here where animal archaeology and animal history can powerfully complement, inspire, and inform each other.

Published online: September 9, 2024

I thank the editorial board of Animal History for inviting me to contribute these reflections to its inaugural issue. Conversations with Dominik Ohrem provided much of the intellectual impetus to write this paper. Perceptive comments by Daniel Vandersommers and Erica Hill helped to improve an earlier version. I acknowledge funding through the interdisciplinary research hub HESCOR (Cultural Evolution in Changing Climate: Human and Earth System Coupled Research) of the University of Cologne, supported by the “Profile Building 2022” initiative of North Rhine-Westphalia’s Ministry for Culture and Science.