Archaeology and Animal Persons: Toward a Prehistory of Human-Animal Relations

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Archaeology and Animal Persons: Toward a Prehistory of Human-Animal Relations”—comes from Volume 4 (2013). In his article, Erica Hill describes some of the ways in which archaeologists are reconstructing human engagements with animals in the past, focusing on relational modes of interaction documented in many hunting and gathering societies.

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Among those animals with particular salience cross-culturally include the iconic jaguar in Amazonia and the Andes. Interactions between humans and jaguars tend to be relational, with these charismatic predators considered kin or earlier, ancestral, or alternative forms of humans (© Land Rover Our Planet via Flickr, CC BY SA-ND 2.0).

ERICA HILL is an archaeologist and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Southeast. She has conducted research throughout the United States and in Chukotka, Mexico, Peru, and Honduras. She is currently working on the prehistory of human-animal relations in the Bering Sea region. Her recent work has appeared in Cambridge Archaeological Journal and Arctic Anthropology.