Contribution to the study of the theoretical foundations of archaeozoological research on recent European and Near Eastern prehistory (Abridged version)
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Our dependence on common sense when it comes to transforming the truncated documentation from our excavation campaigns into interpretative narrative has been regularly emphasised since André Leroi-Gourhan. Its counterpart, and one of the conditions of its existence, is our lack of ethnological culture. We know too little about the characteristics, properties and modes of operation of the vast category of pre-state societies, of which prehistoric European societies are, after all, a part. The aim of ethnoarchaeology and ethnographic comparatism is precisely to familiarise us with this universe, so strange in some respects to our Western eyes, of societies that were once called “primitive”. The article begins with an epistemological reflection on the way in which a set of presuppositions conditions the interpretations of researches devoted to the exploration of the human-animal relationship in societies of late European prehistory. We attempt to show how an implicit model inspired in particular by our knowledge of historical peasantry and a biased conception of the functioning of the primitive economy (both being part of our “intellectual habitus” a scholarly conditioned form of common sense) slips into the process of knowledge production, between the examination of raw facts and the elaboration of interpretations. A detailed examination of pig farming in the New Guinea Highlands then serves to show that the presuppositions of this model are anything but universal. It also leads us to develop alternative models likely to shed new light on prehistoric animal husbandry, for example on the conditions of emergence of the first domestications in the Near East and elsewhere. In this way, we hope to contribute to the development of a catalogue of the forms of animal husbandry known in pre-state, pre-literary and animist societies, both current and sub-actual, with the aim of making it a tool for understanding prehistoric animal husbandry. The underlying idea, which is one of the “commandments” of ethnoarchaeology, is that the depth of the political, social and ontological rupture introduced by the emergence of the state and universal religions is such that the level of proximity between present-day pre-state and prehistoric societies will necessarily be greater than that between the latter and the historical European societies that are the main source of inspiration for the implicit model mentioned above.
Source: Gallia préhistoire
DOI: 10.4000/133bu
Author: Christian Jeunesse
Language: English
Subfield: Paleontology
Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4406387377