Animal Archaeology

This review argues that archaeological methods and theories developed to investigate human prehistory can be extended to the material traces of nonhuman animal pasts. Foundational concepts such as style, ruins, and historical consciousness have enabled archaeologists to explore our own species’ deep histories without texts or living memories. Applying those concepts to birds’ nests, beaver dams, elephant mourning behaviors, and termite mounds, I illustrate how archaeology can generate materially grounded historical narratives about nonhuman species independently of human records and representations. Tracing stylistic changes in the materials and construction techniques of birds’ nests, reconstructing ancient landscapes once inhabited and transformed by beavers, and analyzing elephants’ engagement with their conspecifics’ carcasses, along with the multigenerational occupational histories of termite mounds, I propose recentering humans and nonhumans as agents of material change and makers of the archaeological record. In doing so, I hope to productively disrupt paradigms that restrict historymaking to our species alone and broaden the kinds of actors that can be studied archaeologically.