Bodies of Information: Human-Animal Entanglement at Çatalhöyük and Cis-Baikal as Seen Through Zooarchaeology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Zooarchaeology—the study of the human past through animal remains—has often been said to demonstrate that animals have had a variety of tangible roles in relation to human individuals and cultures throughout time: from sources of food to implements of labour. In contrast, intangible aspects of the human-animal relationship have been generally unrecognized and only recently appreciated within (zoo)archaeological discourse. Through exploratory case studies of research at the sites of Çatalhöyük and Cis-Baikal, it is suggested here that new modes of reflecting upon human-animal bonds are necessary in order to better understand the multifarious meanings and uses of faunal remains from archaeological contexts. Syntheses of human behaviour and belief in relation to non-human animals should incorporate emic cultural understandings, which may be discovered through the devices of ethnographic survey and ethnoarchaeology. Animals are thusly appraised as more than mere sources of subsistence, or tools of transport. A social zooarchaeology, focusing on the intimate affinities between humans and animals, can provide alternative insights into the lived experiences of human cultures. -- In other words, the purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which the practice of zooarchaeology has developed and changed over time, correlating these transformations with progress in theory in the wider field of archaeology. It is an effort to tackle zooarchaeology specifically and bioarchaeology more generally from a theoretical standpoint. The paper incorporates theoretical concepts related to materiality, entanglement, and agency, which appear to be gaining ground in archaeological discourse. These ideas are explored through the context of the aforementioned archaeological sites and the interpretations related to the data from these sites that have been proposed through time. Overall, this paper attempts to clarify and bring to light some of the issues related to current conceptualizations of theory in zooarchaeological practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".