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Temporalities of human-livestock relationships in the late prehistory of the southern Levant

Allentuck, A; (2015) Temporalities of human-livestock relationships in the late prehistory of the southern Levant. Journal of Social Archaeology , 15 (1) 94 - 115. 10.1177/1469605314546071. Green open access

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Abstract

The secondary products revolution is re-appraised here as a critical process in human history that created durable and enduring relationships between people and their livestock. The secondary products revolution is conventionally described in terms of agricultural intensification and a step towards urban development. This process marks a shift from a strategy in which most animals are culled when they reach an optimal weight, which for ruminants occur relatively early in life, to one in which individual animals are selected for their potential to yield one or more renewable products over the course of life and raised until they can no longer produce secondary products, which tends to occur in adulthood. This new mode of practice placed individual members of two species on an intersubjective ontological plane and moreover, spelled a shift in the temporality of human–livestock relations. This paper draws out the consequences of these ever-closer relationships in the course of human efforts to exploit renewable resources from domesticated animals. In particular, secondary products exploitation extended the lives of lactating female stock, sheep and goats desired for their fibres, oxen engaged in ploughing and donkeys working as pack animals. In this paper, the implications of these new long-term human–animal relationships, which originated and intensified sporadically in different regions of the Near East starting as early as the Neolithic, are discussed in light of the new temporality that attended practices of long-term stock-keeping. This model is examined in light of zooarchaeological, micromorphological and representational evidence for human–livestock relations from the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age of the southern Levant.

Type: Article
Title: Temporalities of human-livestock relationships in the late prehistory of the southern Levant
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1177/1469605314546071
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469605314546071
Language: English
Additional information: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page(http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm).
Keywords: human–animal relations, livestock, secondary products, temporality, ontology, southern Levant
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1436696
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