Co-Domestication of Meaning: Humans, Animals, and Mutual Domestication

This thesis proposes a co-domestication of meaning framework in which domestication is a coupled transformation of animal bodies, ecologies, and life histories and the material-semiotic systems through which communities recognize, regulate, and ritualize animals as social beings. Using an archaeology-first, multi-proxy synthesis of published datasets, the thesis evaluates the framework through two global case studies: dogs and camelids. In dogs, biomolecular, isotopic, and mortuary evidence is reorganized into recurring regimes of companion-care, infrastructural labor, and ritual-devotional practice that stabilize “dog-ness” across deep time. In camelids, Andean pastoralism and Afro-Eurasian desert transport are analyzed as coupled shifts in management, mobility, representation, and institutional control. Across both cases, convergent patterning shows that meaning regimes are not epiphenomenal: they shape and are shaped by material management. The thesis concludes with implications for data collection, arguing for integrated recording of context, care, representation, and mobility to make semiotic claims archaeologically testable.