
































We Think With Animals, and Thereby We Are Human 

Review by Melinda Reidinger

Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World 

by Benjamin S. Arbuckle & Sue Ann McCarty (eds) 

University Press of Colorado, 2015

As soon as I learned about the publication of Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World, I was eager

to acquire a copy because of my own interests in the historical uses of animals and in food studies.

We’ve all heard the maxim about animals being good to think with, but what thoughts will the social

zooarchaeologists who contributed to Animals and Inequality give us to chew on? The volume contains

seventeen chapters plus an introduction by the editors, so I will serve up a few samples here to whet

your appetite.

The emerging subfield of social zooarchaeology seeks to answer old questions that we still ask today

about human and animal relations, negotiation of unequal status, and even about the ontological nature

of “animalness”—all in the past tense. The authors of the present volume take these questions around

the globe and back to various depths of time to visit  cultures ranging from the ancient Shang, the

Romanized  provinces  of  the  Mediterranean,  Anatolia,  Benin,  Mississippian  and  Mesoamerican

cultures, and more. Since many of the more popular works to emerge in the last few years on animal

domestication have been written by geneticists or medical researchers, these essays aim to bring a sense

of historical depth to understandings of the transformations of the relationships between humans and

myriad other creatures, many of which were never domesticated and therefore escaped analysis in the

popular studies. As they trace out different people’s relationships with other species, the archaeologists

also explore the ways in which our relationships with animals have marked different statuses within

human social groups. Many of the essays in this volume pick up upon and further the pioneering work



of Ian Hodder,  Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (2012)

who explored categories and contingencies of artifacts, and Tim Ingold who suggested that we “listen

to what non-Western peoples (and indeed certain Western philosophers critical of mainstream thought)

are telling us, we can begin to grasp a quite different view of life: not as the revelation of pre-specified

forms but as the process in which forms are generated. Every living being, as it is caught up in this

process and carries it forward, arises as a undivided centre of awareness and agency –an enfoldment, at

some particular nexus, of the generative potential of a total field of relations …In other words, the use

of metaphor should be understood as a way of drawing attention to real relational unities rather than of

figuratively papering over dualities” (1988, xxiv).

Since well-preserved animal  remains can often be found in abundance at  archaeological  sites,  this

volume’s editors Benjamin S. Arbuckle and Sue Ann McCarty note their usefulness for interpretive

work in their introduction: “the materiality of animals can effectively be used as repositories for, and to

express, a wide range of social information.” As per the title, the information mainly referenced here is

of social status: how it was acquired, maintained, or lost through access to living or dead animals, or

their parts or services (such as traction, or sport, as was the case with falcons). Roderick Campbell,

who  studied  the  ancient  Shang  culture  of  China,  notes  that  both  “animals”  and  “inequality”  are

“intertwined systems of classification” (251), which means that we have to view them in multiple, and

nuanced ways. “It is no longer good enough to describe animals solely in terms of calorie content; now

we must also consider how people used animals to negotiate status and power, frame memories of

themselves, and reference their position in social landscapes.

Such renderings add a needful dynamic element to landscape studies, where animals are seen as active

elements  in  shaping  human  action”  (Norman:  311).  Inequality  may  have  been  traditionally

characterized as difference in rank or dignity, or nowadays as differential access to important resources,

but  Michael  MacKinnon  reminds  us  that  although  inequalities  “permeate  myriad  components  of

culture,”  “upon  closer  inspection  one  realizes  such  imbalances  themselves  may  span  multiple

components. Who or what has more, and why? Who or what ranks higher, and why? Who or what is

privileged or special, and why?” (MacKinnon: 315). Here is where we want to take a look at animals to

help tease out the differences, because, “most cultures distinguish whole ranges of agency, animacy,

and potency: from the inanimate, the insect, and the beast through to the sage, the immortal, and the

god. The common, organizing intermediary of these categorizations and point of reference is, of course,

humanity.



Moreover, “humanity is generally not so much a point in this spectrum of being as an attenuated and

contingent range. The demarcation between god, human, and animal is blurry, shifting, and shaped by

local ontologies of order” (Campbell: 251-2). Zooarchaeology, thus “provides one lens through which

inequalities of wealth or status may be visible materially,  yet this  ideally forms part  of a strategy

involving analysis of multiple material categories and techniques…The conjunctive approach ideally

correlates household-associated faunal assemblages with other indicators of status or wealth to more

convincingly infer inequalities…The multiple, independent lines of evidence that build such arguments

may include faunal remains, botanicals, other artifacts, use of space, architecture, bioarchaeological

data, and documentary history” (Sunseri: 167).

What’s in the pie?

Clearly, this volume is intended for archaeologists (particularly faunal analysts) and their advanced

students, and to a lesser extent for anthropologists and historians who work on some of the particular

topics or cultures covered, or on animals or inequality in broader ways. Yet, I feel that there is much

here that other readers can draw from as well. The volume’s authors collected and interpreted their

faunal  data  using approaches  that  are  standard within the field  today,  but  they  did  not  select  any

methods that were experimental, because that was not its raison d'être. I am not going to pretend for the

purposes of this review that I know my way around an archaeology lab, but it didn’t matter because the

authors do not exclude non-experts from the circle of knowledge. In fact, one of the aspects of all of the

essays that  I  found particularly appealing was the deft  manner  in  which comments and embedded

definitions that seem like “asides“ draw even non-specialists into the conversation. Some particular

examples that come to mind relate to differences among animal fibers such as wool, hair, and kemp, the

old huntsman’s definition of “excoriation,” the “corbyn bone,” the original contents of a “humble pie,”

and the frequent inclusion of common English names for animals next to their Latin ones.



“What is  an Animal?” was  the  deceptively complex question asked by Ingold’s  eponymous 1988

volume, which seems to have inspired a number of the present volume’s authors . The question defies

us  to  take  it  seriously,  because  it  seems  to  submit  to  a  simple  us/them definition  for  an  answer.

However, this is just exploiting the privilege of an uninterrogated querier to make a definition of others

by assuming their  exclusion,  so,  to turn that  back around:  what is  it  about animals that makes us

human? Can we channel Descartes through Lévi-Strauss and say “I think with animals, therefore, or

rather thereby, I am human?”

If there isn’t  an answer that fits  all  humans and all  animals at  all  times,  how do some groups or

individuals become (socially) more or less human than others? And can we draw scales from some

absolute form of animality (or other non-human quality) through partly, fully and more-than human

beings, such as gods/spirits/ancestors? How will these scales look in cross-cultural comparison? And

within a particular one, how does one come to occupy one of these positions within complex networks

or hierarchies of beings?

As one answer, Sugiyama et al.  provide an Ojibwa concept of personhood, defined by agency and

capacity for metamorphosis through establishing interpersonal relationships, which seems to extend

beyond humans and animals to also encompass plants and other natural objects (13). This involves an

intricate dance with the productivity of the landscapes they can either access themselves, or through

their  political  or  other  ties.  “Through  granting  personhood  to  animate  and  inanimate  beings,

Amerindian societies perceive that as humans move through an empirical natural environment they are

also  moving  through  a  cultural  landscape  that  becomes  the  setting  for  developing  meaningful

relationships with their surroundings” (Saunders 1991:109). Thus, in this case, the animal and human

are  “constructed”—created  by  a  culture-specific  system of  classification  and  etymology  based  on

repeated relationships that are negotiated personally and/or collectively with the ‘other-than-human

persons’ (Hallowell 2002; Ulloa 2002)” (ibid).

When ethnozoology creates hierarchies of animals, such as the one uncovered in the burial offerings

found in the Mexican Basin city of Teotihuacan (Classic period), the domestication and management of

the powerful beasts styled as “masters of animals,” such as jaguars, eagles (the “jaguars of the sky”),

wolves, and pumas, put those who made the creatures submit to their power at an analogous vertical

distance above those they ruled to the predators’ distance from their prey. Animals that were captured,

kept  within  the  city,  and  then  ultimately  sacrificed  by  ruling  elites  served  as  metaphors  for  or



exemplified  state  power  and  leaders’ personal  charisma  and  helped  those  who  wielded  them  to

incorporate cosmological qualities into their performances.

“It is obvious that the species that the Teotihuacanos picked for state-level rituals were

determined by the widely established symbolism of the most ferocious carnivores present

in the landscape. These were empowered animals, beasts that gained a fundamental role

in state societies through their ecological and biological characteristics, their interaction

with  humans,  and  their  status  as  top-level  carnivores  within  the  natural  hierarchy”

(Sugiyama et al.: 26).

Animals also had a part to play in constructing mental maps and cosmologies of empire. As in the

above case, the temple in Tenochtitlan also held buried remains of species that were not considered

comestible,  but  were imbued with symbolic  values.  This  time,  however,  there was a  geographical

breadth to their selection that emphasized the conquests and political or economic ties thus established

as well as resources that were available through tribute and trade to the rulers of an empire that reached

out to both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, spanning a vast array of ecosystems in between.

“The use of fauna in offerings to recreate[s] vertical tiers of the universe and configure[s] veritable

cosmograms…Thus, coral, clams, and snails symbolized the aquatic underworld; felines, turtles, and

sawfish, the surface of the earth; and eagles, herons, and hummingbirds, the skies above” (Luján et al.:

36). The taxa identified had lived in nine different environments including coastal seas, reefs, estuaries,

freshwater  environments,  grasslands/pine-oak  forests,  hillsides  and prairies,  temperate  and  tropical

forests,  temperate  and  arid  mountains,  and  deserts”  (ibid:  44).  Some  of  these  creatures  were

distinguished by unusual features such as strangely-shaped bodies, long spines, sharp teeth, or unusual

colors (ibid:  36).  In the authors’ opinion,  the Mexica priests  who buried these faunal assemblages

“endeavored  to  express,  through  ritual  language,  a  typical  ‘definition  by  extension’—that  is,  a

definition that expressed the whole by enumerating each one of its parts (ibid: 53).

But it was not only the bearers of state power who used animals to characterize their status. As H.

Edwin  Jackson  discovered,  “Ethnohistoric  and  ethnographic  accounts  indicate  the  importance  of

animals  as  representatives  of  different  parts  of  the  earthly  and  cosmic  realms  of  [prehistoric

Mississipian] Indian conceptualizations of the universe. These associations were often inferred from

particular characteristics of certain taxa; simultaneously, as determined by the realms they represented,

the associations conferred supernatural qualities on the elite social stratum…There were likely to have

been  multiple  dimensions  on  which  these  qualities  were  measured:  pure–polluted,  order–disorder,



weak–strong,  and  harmless–dangerous,  for  example”  (Jackson:  113).  Here,  researchers  discovered

there were subtle differences to be teased out in the frequency of particular cuts of meat, the scale of

feasting, access to prestigious craft items made from non-food animals, or sometimes the presence of

remains of an animal, such as a squirrel, that was known to represent diplomatic office in later societies

that arose in the region surveyed.

Animals could be also be used to fit  into more abstract  cosmological  schemata,  as exemplified in

Abigail Holeman’s study on the use of red and green feathers from non-indigenous scarlet and military

macaws in Northern Mexico. The use of color/directional symbolism, sometimes associated with birds,

animals,  stones,  shells,  clans,  deities,  seasons,  etc.  is  well  known across  the  Pueblo  lands  of  the

American  Southwest  all  the  way  down  to  southern  Mesoamerica,  with  local  variations  in  the

correspondences. The parrots’ brilliant plumage therefore participated in a structuring principle that

governed many areas  of life  and granted access  to arcane powers to  those who wielded the most

powerful color-bearing objects.

She writes: “Along with others, I argue the power to create and maintain a hierarchical position lay in

the ability to control and mobilize ritual knowledge…or as Whiteley put it in reference to the Hopi,

‘secret ritual knowledge serves as the. . .”currency” of power. . .[and] both configures the structuring of

hierarchy and provides the idiom of political action.’ To be effective, this ritual knowledge must be

displayed in highly controlled contexts; in other words, it must be displayed in rituals” (130). In the

case of the items crafted with the parrot feathers in Paquimé, they must be understood within the

context of

“repeated associations of red and green across different  media,  suggesting the scarlet

macaw was  folded into  a  local  system of  meaning.  These  items  may have taken on

significance mainly in reference to each other, or the red and green in combination. This

suggests that red and green were part of a ritual complex that bestowed rank on those

who were able to use these symbols and display their knowledge in rituals associated

with both human and avian mortuary practices. The limited distribution of both the birds

and the ceramic hand drum suggest that access to these items was restricted…There was

clearly a limited group of people allowed to mobilize the red and green colors together,

and therefore a limited number of people who could demonstrate their ritual knowledge

in this particular way by linking themselves to the deities and/or powers associated with

these colors” (139-140).



Lest it seem that animals can only be passively manipulated by humans beings into symbolizing their

position  vis-à-vis  others  of  their  kind,  the  study by Neil  L.  Norman  entitled  “Pythons,  Pigs,  and

Political Process in the Hueda Kingdom, Benin, West Africa AD 1650–1727” discusses the roles played

by pythons in “multiple scales” (Oof! That was a bad one!) and locations within the historical kingdom

of Hueda. His contribution “builds on attempts to expand the theorization of socialized landscapes

beyond  built  places  and  the  unbuilt  spaces  connecting  them,  to  include  the  numerous  animate,

nonhuman things that did memory work, actively framed social relations, and served as mediums for

configuring  and reconfiguring  identity.  In  short,  the  chapter  argues  that  pythons  were  part  of  the

materiality of the Huedan social world and thus builds on this volume’s focus on writing animals into

human landscapes to arrive at a more complete rendering of past social landscapes” (p. 297).

As part of both the human and natural landscapes (ibid: 305), pythons shaped relationships between

people, their cosmos, and their domestic spaces:

Huedans today associate ditches with pythons, because ditches contain aesthetic elements

associated with the constrictors. These shadowy and dank spaces are ideal for python

habitation; they provide the cool and moist temperature that protects a python’s skin, and

the vermin that provide a large portion of their diet. When viewed from the surface, the

ditches trace a sinuous pattern on the landscape and shape movement away from their

voids  in  undulating  patterns.  Such  shapes  and  patterns  are  also  associated  with  the

movement of pythons, as are strips of white cloth flapping in the breeze and a cord or

string placed on the ground. The logic is clear: ditches that evoke the aesthetic elements

associated with pythons and that restrict practitioners’ movements are potent landscape

features  aimed  at  protecting  the  family,  or  families,  living  in  interiors  of  house

compounds from uncertainty located on the outside (Norman and Kelly 2004; p. 306).

Beyond protecting and delineating the Huedan household compound, the snakes also served as senior

or tutelary deities, and were sometimes also used to lend grandeur to massive affairs of state, such as an

annual parade by the king and his retinue to their temple, thus bringing something of the wild into

cultural spaces.

H. Edwin Jackson describes a general rule for elite control of animals and their gifts to humankind: “In

societies with centralized economies, autocratic rulers and/or other elites also often had control of the

rearing of domesticated animals, and were able to ‘divert livestock resources as needed to support the

goals of state, as well as control access to animal products in a manner that ensured that the social and



political order was reflected by patterns of consumption” (p. 107). However, when animals are neither

wild (such as the pythons), nor primarily slaughtered for meat or for materials for craft products –

because their  consumption may be uneconomical  – it  can be useful  to  examine variable access to

secondary animal products.

“Mechanisms of communication in an ancient empire: the correspondence between the king of Assyria

and his magnates in the 8th century BC” – Assyrian empire builders (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sargon/)

Close examination of faunal remains can help disentangle the webs of interrelationship between groups

who have interwoven yet distinct roles in a society, as Levent Atisi manages in his “Tracing Inequality

from Assur to Kultepe/Kanesh: Merchants, Donkeys and Clay Tablets.” He writes: “systems of animal

management  and  exploitation  played  a  central  role  in  establishing  and  maintaining  systems  of

inequality at Kanesh during the MBA.” In an area where ethnicity seemed to be a fluid concept lacking

fixed markers, “asymmetrical access” to animals that could be ridden, driven before a plough, used to

carry packs,  or  sheared  for  wool  not  only  shored up an  individual’s  or  a  household’s  position by

providing immediate services and a form of economic surpluses and heritable wealth, but, could even

(in the case of wool, anyway) on a larger scale “protect the trade network” and “legitimize the local

political agendas,” which were based upon keeping the social roles disparate (p. 243).

Now that we’ve seen the uses to which animals-as-things can be directed, Roderick Campbell helpfully

re-complicates the question of how these things come to be by opening up his brilliant essay “Animal,

Human, God: Pathways of Shang Animality and Divinity” with the etymology of the concept of the

“thing”.1 He colors between the “lines” traced out by Tim Ingold (2007) by stating that “the nature of

things is not bounded and atomistic, but rather collective and interconnected. Second, in seeing people

in the same terms he implies at least potential equivalence. Third, by conceiving both people and things



as tied-together paths of growth and movement, he asks us to consider the dimension of time and the

potential for transformation” (p. 251).

In  this  study,  the  positioning  of  human  beings  takes  place  within  the  context  of  their  shifting

identification with polarized qualities like wild/tame or male/female. A given human being may be

positioned closer to gods and deified ancestors or to livestock than to other humans occupying the

middle ground – but each individual is a moving target. Displacement from one position on the scales

of honor,  value and service to another would take place after particular types of actions had been

performed upon one, or fate had taken a decisive course.

War, in particular, was capable of wreaking such changes, for it “combined the divine, the human, the

animal, and the material in a crucible of violence that dialectically transformed both the defeated and

the victors, captives, and captors. Meeting as equals on the field of battle, the captured losers would be

reduced to something less than human, the capturing victors elevated to something more” (p. 256).

Besides  war,  hunting  was  another  deeply  consequential  activity  that,  “along  with  sacrifice  and

divination, formed a suite of kingly ordering practices aimed at the domestication of the enemy, the

wild, the dead, and the numinous” (p. 252).

If each person’s status is liable to change, humanity, Campbell tells us (as I already cited above, but

repeated  here  for  emphasis),  “is  generally  not  so  much  a  point  in  this  spectrum  of  being  as  an

attenuated and contingent range. The demarcation between god, human, and animal is blurry, shifting,

and shaped by local ontologies of order,” or, to put a finer point on it, distinctions are graded by legible

acts of ordering (as above, though those are not the only ones). Along this scale, “animal” becomes a

relational term of being and agency rather than a “fixed category of bounded things”. He suggests

following Ingold’s (2008) lead and viewing animals, therefore, as “shifting nodes of interconnected

properties and relationships” (p. 252), which allows us to trace out the unique life stories of individuals.

The genius of this chapter, which I have to admit was my favorite in the whole collection, was the way

that  following  these  movements  generated  laconic  biographies.  Portraits  like  the  one  below,  of  a

sacrificed warrior, provide excellent illustration for the author’s primary argument about the fluidity of

these categories: “…from child to kinsman, to respected warrior, to nameless captive, to animalized

sacrificial  livestock,  to  symbolically  destroyed  body,  to  ritual  deposit  and  animating  force.  This

pathway of ren [person] crosses that of other categories of offering at the locus of elite sacrifice such as

niu (cattle),  shi (pig),  chuan (dog), or  yang (sheep/goat) but diverges from most of them thereafter,



terminating as ritual deposit rather than passing through the kitchen and the meal to the midden, or the

workshop to a new life as a bone artifact” (p. 254).

Human/animal relationships can be enigmatic.

If you’re still reading this review, you may have worked up an appetite by now. The Anthropological

Book Forum is not yet interactive enough to dispense snacks, but we can open up a discussion of food

and you can go get your own. Arjun Appadurai’s (1981) concept of “gastro-politics,” or using food to

create and reinforce competitive social advantage, as the editors parse it, is nothing new. (“The history

of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat” – Sweeney Todd.) Yet, while this may

be a commonly entertained understanding, new examples can always be found that challenge our ideas

about who had access to what sort of victuals, how they were distributed, or – even more specifically –

what various parts or cuts of meat may have meant to those who parceled them out and consumed them

(or perhaps craftily re-sold or redistributed them through unofficial channels.)

As  Susan  deFrance  illustrated  with  findings  from  the  Wari  site  of  Cerro  Baul,  Southern  Peru,

sometimes elite status is indicated by a “luxury of variety” in both food and nonfood animals. “The

ability to acquire a variety of animals reflects elite control of trade networks, the means to transport

food items from distant lands, and the ability to order specialists to acquire local wild animals through

hunting or  other  capture methods…A variety  of  fauna may also signify  gifts  or  offerings  that  are

brought by supplicants or individuals invited from the hinterland to the regional capital. A diverse range

of foods circumscribed in their spatial distribution may indicate that elites created a class of luxury

foods and restricted the intake of these foods to enforce their social standing” (p. 63). Where people are

able to hunt, fish, or gather animal sources of protein outside of organized networks of husbandry, the

elite’s share of the butchery may be defined more by relative abundance,  or the cuts of meat they

consumed. Or, perhaps, by their ability to hold larger-scale feasts than others (See Watson: 146 for



discussion of Hayden’s typology of distinctive and solidarity-type feasts), or access to more luxurious

ritual or craft goods.

On the other hand, there have been places where a more monotonous diet could indicate elite status.

Such was the case with pork in the Roman Empire/Romanized provinces, where the elite associations

for pork-rich diets developed through elite identity labeling and military dietary influence. “Both of the

key social groups (elites and the military), it appears, regularly promoted the consumption of pork,

where viable, as a means to display inequality. They wished to be viewed as special and privileged in

this respect, and pork consumption helped characterize this inequality” (pp. 329-330).

As a general principle, “elite control over animal-based commodity production” has been viewed as

“one of the primary factors that fueled the rise of complex societies in multiple regions of the Old

World” (Arbuckle and McCarty: 6). But do the elite always enforce their will? And is their will always

to further expand the disparity between their own position and others’? When can we observe pushback

from below, or attempts by elites themselves to rein in their own powers? The essay by Joshua Wright

about the Mongolian structures called khirigsuur, and the one by Naomi Sykes on venison consumption

patterns  in  Roman  Britain  speak  of  sacrifice  and  monumental  architecture  that  undermines  social

inequality and of fellowships of poachers and smugglers.

Turning first to Mongolia, the dominant landmarks provide an interesting case study in the institutions

that helped knit societies together in the steppes of Inner Asia, where nomadic pastoralists tended to

leave behind public monuments rather than domestic structures. The author argues that these building

projects “discourage inequality by commemorating events of social cohesion…the largest monuments

are not monuments to hierarchy but are instead demonstrations of community solidarity and leveling

mechanisms in a Bronze Age society in which models of social order were being negotiated by early

nomadic pastoralists” (Wright: 275). In the Mongolian human ecology, each family was equally reliant

upon horses for food, travel, traction and some other secondary products such as milk and bone. While

the  animals  were  certainly  repositories  of  value  and  personal  wealth,  they  were  also  “common,

quotidian tools” (ibid: 283) to which everyone had access, for the nomadic lifestyle required it, and she

suggests that the monuments, although they contained the bones of sacrificed animals, nonetheless

signified living horses (p. 277) in a permanent way.

Ritual centers where horses were “consumed” (in sacrifice) therefore performed, in a sense, the same



action as each herder when he culled his own. Such acts were constitutive of a common cosmology and

reflected a mortuary order which was not centered on hierarchy but “on the affirmation of common

experience in a mobile world in which humans and animals interact within a landscape made up of

subsistence resources and monumental structures” (ibid: 283). “[T]he answer to the question of ’who

caused the horses to be sacrificed at these monuments’ is that those who gathered there did. They did so

not by the command of one person, living or dead, but by the will of the group” (ibid: 286).

Furthermore, the khirigsuur [stone mounds with outlying structures; all of which contained the remains

of horses] were not formally much different from funerary monuments for wealthy, charismatic leaders,

though the latter would typically contain few equid remains (ibid); so if this can be styled a “popular”

type of architecture, it was not set apart from an elite type.

“The  Rhetoric  of  Meat  Apportionment:  Evidence  for  Exclusion,  Inclusion,  and Social  Position  in

Medieval  England”  by  Naomi  Sykes  focuses  on  the  procurement,  portioning,  and  distribution  of

venison. She reminds us that “as animal carcasses are, by nature, hierarchical, the giving and receiving

of meat often plays an important sociopolitical role, with cuts of different (perceived) quality being

given to individuals as a meaty symbol of their age, gender, wealth, or power...Exclusion from such

performances can be equally expressive, communicating separation and social difference” (p. 356).

For her analysis, she uses animal bones as a primary material since there is little textual evidence for

the foodways of  the time,  then  she turns  to  knives,  including the renowned seax,  and ceremonial

drinking vessels which first served as practical, then mainly symbolic tools. She describes a complex

interlocking of estates and duties revolving around exchanges of foodstuffs:

the period’s economy was based on the accumulation and redistribution of food, whereby

landholders were paid in kind for the use of their land, with portions of these food rents

given over to support kings and their court as they toured their kingdoms. Kings could, in

turn, transfer accrued provisions to religious institutions that, unlike the itinerant royal

court, were stationary and depended on supplies gravitating toward them. Lower down

the social scale, estate workers could expect to receive food payments in return for their

services…The skeletal distribution for religious houses suggests that ecclesiastics were

taking receipt of pre-butchered joints of venison and possibly skins (indicated by the high

representation of feet), and it is feasible that these were gifted by the king or local nobles

in return for pastoral care. The overrepresentation of heads on elite sites finds resonance



with the practices of modern hunting and pastoral societies. (p. 360)

In this society, to maintain one’s position against other comers was akin to a zero-sum game. When

others could gain the same privileges, then one’s own position had to be slipping. “[F]or the thegns it

was not enough simply to hunt more often; in order to maintain their social position they had to stop

the lower classes from doing likewise. So, whereas it had previously been accepted that wild animals

were res nullius (property of no one), the Late Anglo-Saxon elite established private game reserves and

other restrictions that curbed the rights of peasants to take and consume wild animals “ (p. 362). That is

not to say, though, that peasants did not participate in hunting, but they would be hired as beaters and

drivers. “Together with the overall reduction in game representation seen for lower-status settlements,

this hints that the peasants were being excluded from hunting culture and presumably also the halls

where venison was divided and consumed” (ibid). By the Late Anglo-Saxon period, everyone knew

their place and their duties well: they had by that time already been laid out formally within charters

and documents such as the  Rectitudines Singularum Personarum (p. 365). Therefore,  there was no

more need to swagger with ostentations carving and serving implements.

While cultural debates rage on the effects of inequality in the societies we live in, they seem to take on

the character of polarity: that this much inequality is too much, or that much is still tolerable, or a range

is  identified  that  might  be  pushed  wider  or  squeezed  back  together.  These  debates  are  generally

constructive for us and will, of course, continue. However, part of the message conveyed by the end of

this  collection  is  that  inequality  can  also  be  a  creative  and  constitutive  force  within  a  society.

“Inequality  should not  always  be associated  with  social  division because,  although it  is  clear  that

venison was being used to define social position, its communal consumption must simultaneously have

served to create community” (Sykes: 368). It seems clear that inequality should not always be viewed

in negative terms because, in many respects, community does not exist without it – even in the least

hierarchical societies there is internal ranking” (p. 370). While such examples are far from abundant, it

is  instructive  to  observe where  people seem to have been brought  together  in  juicy,  creative,  and

beneficial ways, and where, on the other hand, divisions have fomented trouble.

In conclusion, I heartily recommend this volume to anyone who would like to read interesting and

unusual case studies that have been unpacked by archaeologists from various corners of the globe and

strata  of  human  history.  Those  who  study  human-animal-environmental  relationships  or  who  are

interested in acquiring a new lens through which to view social inequality will find it well worth their

time and it will open up new challenges for their own research projects.



Note

1. Here is an even more detailed etymology, which has been painstakingly crafted from six different

reference works: ”it is possible to trace back the origin of the substantive thing to the Indo-European

root  *ten-, which had a main acceptation of "to extend (in space or in time)". Originally, this Indo-

European root  denoted the idea of a  "meeting at  a  fixed time",  which could certainly explain the

development of the meanings "affairs", "things", and "thing" during the evolution of the substantive.

The substantive  thing is related to the Gothic  þeihs ("time, assembly taking place at a fixed time")

through this  Indo-European root.  The Indo-European root  then  generated  the  Proto-Germanic  root

*thenzán, from which the substantive thing originates in Old English. Through its Proto-Germanic root,

the substantive thing is related to the following words: thing ("assembly, action, matter, thing") in Old

Frisian,  thing ("assembly, action, matter, thing") in Old Saxon,  thing in Old Dutch,  dinc ("law suit,

matter, thing") in Middle Dutch, which became  ding ("thing") in Modern Dutch, and  ding,  dinc or

thing ("assembly, law suit, thing") in Old German, which then became  dinc ("assembly") in Middle

High German, and then  ding ("matter, affairs, thing") in Modern German…”Which brings us to our

modern English concept of a “thing,” which, of course, is deeply entangled with many forms of law,

decisions by assemblies of important persons, and trajectories through time and space. If you are still

reading  this,  the  nerd  in  me  salutes  the  nerd  in  you.  Source:

http://www.dualjuridik.org/uk/Etymology/thing.htm

References Cited

Appadurai, Arjun

1981. “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia.  American Ethnologist Vol. 8, No. 3, Symbolism and

Cognition (Aug., 1981), pp. 494-511

DualJuridik: http://www.dualjuridik.org/uk/Etymology/thing.htm

Hodder, Ian

2012.  Entangled:  An Archaeology of  the Relationships  between Humans and Things.  Chichester:

Wiley-Blackwell.

Ingold, Tim

1988. What Is An Animal? London: Unwin Hyman.



2007. Lines: A Brief History. Abington: Routledge.

Melinda Reidinger studied cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia and now teaches at

Anglo-American  University  in  Prague.  Her  current  research interests  are  in  the  entanglements  of

native and recently created breeds of animals with totalitarian regimes in Central Europe, and in the

history  of  the  fruit  tree  plantings  along country  roads.  Managed landscapes,  exurban rituals  and

retreats,  and  the  persistence  of  Romantic  ideas  of  Nature  and  civilization  are  some  of  the  most

frequently recurring themes in her work.

© 2015 Melinda Reidinger 


