The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication Pastoralism and Predation (One World Archaeology)

This book is one of a series of more than 20 volumes resulting from the World Archaeological Congress, September l986. The series is the result of an attempt to bring together not only archaeologists and anthropologists from many parts of the world, as well as academics from contingent disciplines, but also non-academics from a wide range of cultural backgrounds who could lend their own expertise to the discussions at the Congress. The series addresses world archaeology in its widest sense, investigating how people lived in the past and how and why changes took place, resulting in the forms of society and culture which exist today. This is an account of the varying interactions which can exist between humans and mammals, birds, fish and invertebrates, in any society, in any part of the world and in both the past and the present. The contributors aim to show that this symbiosis is often more than a simple matter of economic contract and necessity. It is not only the technical and detailed problems of how to recognize animal domestication that are presented here, but also a view of the actual experience and meaning of the relationships humans have with other species and their capacity or lack of capacity to live in close proximity and in mutual interdependence with other living creatures. "The walking larder" explores the diversity of the past as well as documenting a range of social and cultural attitudes which cannot be disentangled from an economic domestication process. It also looks at the present and aims to demonstrate that the intimate cultural relationships between humans and other animals continue to be modified and altered by the encroachment and innovations of different cultures.