Peter Mitchell's compact book offers a practical and informative introduction to the largely unsung but widespread presence of the working donkey (and mule) in human history. This should herald a new strand of publications encouraging archaeologists, anthropologists and historians towards greater working-animal-mindedness in investigations of relevant eras and regions. Mitchell deliberately aligns himself with the growing body of thought focusing on animals in human life—the “animal turn” (p. 4). He refers to the process of “mutual domestication” (p. 3), although his scope excludes significant implications for new human activity such as the production of fodder, and the complex economic processes of sharing working animals among the community.
The author organises his analysis of published material chrono-geographically, beginning in the donkeys’ native habitat in north-eastern Africa, moving into Egypt and then shifting north to trace their adoption and use in the ancient Near East, the Classical world, Europe and colonial expansions therefrom. Amid these analyses, the chapter on medieval and pre-modern periods is entitled (from Braudel) ‘The triumph of the mule’, although mules appear in earlier chapters and continue throughout, while the donkey remains sturdily present.
The origins of this branch of the Equus family are described early on, and Mitchell follows Haskel Greenfield in naming the wild (E. africanus) and domesticated (E. asinus) animals separately, although clear evidence has emerged of long-term gene flow between the two. From earliest to modern times (uniquely among livestock species), selective breeding has been rare in the ‘domestication’ of donkeys, with deliberately permeable boundaries between wild and domesticated donkey populations. Mitchell is at home with Egyptian material, and expands in detail on the transport role and symbolic value of the donkey there. He then follows the limited archaeological clues of donkey presence to the west and south, tracing them briefly as far as Kenya and Tanzania. He closes the subject with his somewhat controversial argument, which has been aired in earlier published work (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2017), that the lack of donkey expansion (but not cattle) into much of sub-Saharan Africa before recent times can largely be ascribed to barriers formed by regions infected with trypanosomiasis. There is certainly more to be written, from modern development studies and other resources, on the growing role of the working donkey in many sub-Saharan regions today, enlarging on Mitchell's suggestion that the donkey, associated as it is throughout history with the lowly and disenfranchised (notably women to this day (p. 232 and Goulder (Reference Goulder2016: 76–79)), can provide an “entry point” (p. 3) into understanding such lives.
The author opens the extensive subject of the working donkey in the ancient Near East with an overview of claims for its early presence (although debate remains as to the existence of wild donkeys in the region, and the zooarchaeological picture is blurred by common finds of the related Equus hemionus). He makes a cogent and passionate argument for the key role of the donkey in underpinning many of the social and economic transformations evident in this region in the fourth and third millennia BC, continuing with accounts of the large-scale donkey-caravan trade in the southern Levant and as recorded in the later archives from Kültepe, Mari and Ugarit. He makes an excursion (self-admittedly brief) farther into Asia, then returns to the Near East to discuss the production and ceremonial usage of hemione-donkey hybrids, including an account of the phenomenon of apparent sacred burials of both these and donkeys—although he does not refer to Zarins's comprehensive Reference Zarins2014 work on equids in the third millennium BC.
Mitchell repeats his argument for the central importance in human history of working donkeys, and mules (“mostly” male (p. 131)), although females were common at this period, in relation to Classical and later times, with a wider variety of evidence at his disposal, including far more written sources. He returns to Asia to record the ubiquity of donkeys and mules alongside camels in the great caravan routes to China, going on to describe colonial introductions into the Americas, southern Africa and Australia, through which donkeys and mules were actively imported and bred in these new regions.
Mitchell's work deliberately fills a gap rather than offering specialist or unpublished material. His strong academic basis being in African prehistory means that much of the discussion takes place largely outside his home-zone, but in recent years he has demonstrated his growing interest in the presence of animals in the human world, leading to work on dogs, horses and now donkeys. He suggests, rightly in this reviewer's opinion, that up to now, works on the history of the donkey are either in need of updating, focus overly on the horse or “engage little with the archaeological record” (p. 9). He argues that his archaeology-oriented approach incorporates the physical traces of donkeys, their “osteobiography” (p. 237), into a historical and anthropological examination of the subject, shedding a sidelight on potentially agenda-ridden histories and depictions, and providing longer-period tracking. In practice, he acknowledges (p. 173) his unenviable task due to the unrepresentative nature of zooarchaeological remains, for as is the case in many cultures, donkeys are not commonly eaten and so do not feature in settlement food-middens. He admits to drawing heavily on non-archaeological data (p. 7), and in ancient Mesopotamia in particular, he necessarily relies on cuneiform texts to a significant extent.
Mitchell intersperses his text with a range of clearly drawn maps, and numerous photographs, mainly greyscale except for a section of 32 colour plates. The latter's frequent sourcing from Wikimedia Commons or Flickr simplifies the ‘permissions’ process, but does at times result in somewhat generic illustrations that contribute little to the work. A minor quibble in an otherwise nicely edited work: on page 27 the Latin tag should refer to “peperit” and not “piperit”. These are, however, minor weaknesses in an otherwise useful case for the study of the donkey, which merits wide readership.
