I am sitting at my computer with a purring cat resting its head against the keyboard – a real animal–animal situation and a reciprocal relationship. For 15 years, my wife and I looked after horses that our children had left behind when they moved off into the world. The reason was that the horses belonged, in their own way, to the extended family. So I have no difficulty understanding what Overton and Hamilakis call ‘social zooarchaeology’. As a pet owner who has personally observed the individuality of animals – from hens to horses – I have no problem accepting their view that animals are individuals, something that my urban colleagues often question. When discussing with hunters who have specialized for many years in one type of hunting, they can describe how different individuals in flocks – for example, among red deer and moose – can behave. They spend many hours moving in the terrain and observe the different animal species, not to hunt them but to acquire further knowledge about the animals, sometimes to find out which animals should later be culled, but often only for the sheer pleasure of feeling a kind of relationship between themselves and the animals they follow.
An important component of the study of osteological material is a good knowledge of ethology. This was something Mesolithic people possessed. They had a very good knowledge of the behaviour of the different animals that moved through their hunting grounds. We must bear in mind that thousands of years of experience informed them about these patterns of movement, and their way of engaging with nature through hunting and gathering was more similar to agriculture and animal husbandry than we usually recognize.
Aggersund was only one of a large number of sites that existed as a result of the patterns in which a group's prey moved varying distances each year. Our knowledge of the full picture is limited by problems of representation due to both preservation conditions and the selection of excavated sites. An example of this can be seen in the fact that until recently, only a few short-term settlements with well-preserved organic material in boggy areas were known. But today, after extensive field surveys in a boggy area of several square kilometres in central Scania, southern Sweden, more than a hundred small camps have been documented and investigated (Larsson and Sjöström Reference Larsson and Sjöström2011). With an increased amount of material for analysis, it is highly likely that finds of specific hunting, like that of the whooper swans in Aggersund, could give us a greater potential to extend our interpretations of relations between humans and other animals.
One can ask whether many of the animals found in these archaeological sites were primarily hunted for meat consumption. For example, front teeth of various animals are often found as beads in Mesolithic graves. These teeth compositions sometimes represent several dozens of dead animals, and in settlement site material the jaws from the same animals are usually relatively well preserved. This raises the question whether certain animals may have been hunted solely to provide ornamentation. If that were the case, this could very well be linked to central ideas in social zooarchaeology. Analyses of more than 2,000 tooth beads from more than forty graves have illuminated several aspects of the relationship with animal species and how they were integrated in ornamental dress (Larsson Reference Larsson, Larsson and Zagorska2006). In hunting societies, pendants made of animal teeth are often common decorative objects, as tooth pendants are used to adorn the body and decorate clothing. The tooth pendants would have had a multifaceted meaning, and can be viewed as a kind of abstraction of the wild environment. When teeth are extracted from the animals and reshaped, they are transformed into a domesticated form. As pendants, carnivorous and herbivorous animals, and animals from marine and terrestrial environments, are mixed together in an artificial world completely ruled by humans. Yet, at the same time, they remain part of the wild, and their special qualities might be transferred to the wearer. The use of teeth from particular animals may be generally taken to reflect norms and values accepted by individuals living in a shared physical and social environment. One has to keep in mind that the marking of different species makes the division of species very obvious. It would not be possible to recognize the distinction of the teeth unless one came very close to the person wearing them. The specific arrangements of different species most likely reflected a special meaning for the wearer and/or the person who arranged the pendants. I argue here that the most important concern was that people had knowledge about the arrangement, not that it was visible to everyone. The symbolic or social meanings of the decoration were based upon concepts accepted by society and did not need to be fully known and visible to people other than those who approved the outfit.
It is clear from the analysis of wear marks in the perforation of the tooth root that different animals’ teeth were worn for different lengths of time. In several cases significant variations in use wear could be identified in the same set of teeth. Since a dress has to be worn a lot to cause extensive use-wear, it is very probable that some tooth beads were added to the dress during a person's life, while others were worn by more than one generation. The majority of teeth, for example from red deer and wild boar, showed relatively limited use-wear, whereas wolf and bear, as well as aurochs, more often had heavy use-wear and therefore would have been worn for a longer time. This can probably be related to the way different animals were perceived in different social spheres.
Other examples of the relationship between humans and their prey, which also can be interpreted in a way that can be integrated in some form of social zooarchaeology, are the finds of red deer antler in graves. One such grave from the Late Mesolithic cemetery of Skateholm II in southernmost Sweden contained five antler crowns, which had been placed on top of the body of a young man. Apart from the interpretations in terms of shamanism, fertility and rebirth that have already been presented (Larsson 1988), the antlers can also be interpreted alongside the ideas presented by Overton and Hamilakis for the antler headdresses from Star Carr.
Overton and Hamilakis illustrate their discussion with the significance of the dog in different societies. It is, then, particularly interesting to consider another grave in the same cemetery, where a buried dog had been given not just red deer antlers but also a decorated antler tool and three flint knife blades (Larsson Reference Larsson, Vermeersch and Van Peer1990). Here the relationship between human and red deer can be seen as being mediated through the dog – an example of how the social relationship between humans and other animals probably was much more complex than merely a direct relationship. The dog mentioned above can be included in the group of buried bodies with the largest number of grave goods. Generally speaking, the evidence of the dozen or so dog graves in the cemeteries Skateholm I and Skateholm II, both pups and fully grown individuals, clearly marks the social role played by the dog. Another example of this complex relationship is a feature at Bredasten, a Late Mesolithic find spot roughly 20 kilometres east of Skateholm. Here a pup was found surrounded by a trench-shaped structure filled with bones from a number of well-known prey animals (Jonsson Reference Jonsson1986; Larsson Reference Larsson1986). This may be a true grave where the rich deposit of bones could have been a deliberate act in the social relations between humans, dogs and other animals.
One should be careful about perceiving the Mesolithic as an unchanging period. In Northern Europe, which is the focus for this article, there were significant climatological and isostatic/eustatic changes that affected both fauna and flora. Human impact in the form of the hunting of certain animals may also have been significant. For example, in southern Scandinavia people's ideas about the elk, an important prey item in the Early Mesolithic, may have changed when it became increasingly rare. The central significance of this animal from several different social perspectives is clear not least from the finds and depictions in the form of rock carvings and paintings of later date which occur in hunter-gatherer societies in Norrland (Fandén Reference Fandén2002; Sjöstrand Reference Sjöstrand2011) and indeed still occur in areas with a high density of elk. The bear manifested in amber sculptures may have been yet another animal that was perceived as having a special relationship with humans, as also evidenced in later times. In the Late Mesolithic the red deer may have been felt to be an animal with special bonds to humans, as exemplified above.
Those who have difficulty accepting the ideas of social zooarchaeology would do well to consider how the stork is perceived in most countries of Northern Europe. If a stork nested on the farm it meant that humans and animals alike gained extra protection against violence and misfortune. The idea that the stork brings babies is one of several examples of the form that contact between humans and wild animals could take. When excavating an Early Neolithic settlement site in southern Sweden several years ago we found stork bones, and a picture immediately spread among members of the excavation team of a little farm with a stork's nest.
But why confine ourselves to social zooarchaeology, why not think in terms of social bioarchaeology? Richard Bradley has ironically stated, ‘Successful farmers have social relations with one another, while hunter-gatherers have ecological relations with hazelnuts’ (Reference Bradley1984, 11). But could there not be an interesting state of affairs behind this statement? Why can we not perceive some form of social relationship with hazelnuts? They were an important part of the human diet during the winter, and hazelnuts were also used as a neck decoration (Larsson Reference Larsson1983). Similar remarks have been made about the water chestnut (Sundelin Reference Sundelin1920). During certain parts of the year, Mesolithic people devoted considerable time and thought to the hazelnut. It is probably also the case that people deliberately planted hazelnuts in new areas, as suggested by the rapid northward spread of the hazel (Iversen Reference Iversen1973). Hazel had many uses in Mesolithic societies, for instance the well-documented practice of making large trapping devices for fish (Pedersen Reference Pedersen, Pedersen, Fischer and Aaby1997). It would be strange if the hazel did not have a special place in people's minds, somewhat similar to the whooper swans in the article discussed here. In more recent times there have been frequent notions of how trees and other plants were integrated in social spheres.
Marek Zvelebil's well-known statement, ‘The time has come to put man before fish’ (Reference Zvelebil and Fisher1995, 422), can be pursued in a similar train of thought. Different fish species may have had different relations to humans. The significance of the salmon, not just as staple food but also in the conceptual world, is exemplified among the tribes on the east coast of North America, where its significance can be followed for thousands of years (Hayden Reference Hayden2004). A similar state of affairs probably existed in parts of Scandinavia (Brøndegaard Reference Brøndegaard1985).
Overton and Hamilakis are sensible in not seeking to completely demolish an old paradigm in favour of a new one, as they say in their conclusion. This is, after all, a research area where the possibilities of interpretation are, to say the least, varied. But their presentation provides an opportunity to examine and evaluate old finds, as Overton and Hamilakis do with the whooper swans. We can hope that this will have an impact on the development excavation methods to include a concern for the questions and interpretations presented by social zooarchaeology. This may be especially relevant in Mesolithic research, where, at least in Northern Europe, there is often analysable osteological material, and also because it is only in recent years, in contrast to Neolithic research, that we have seen analyses that go beyond a purely functionalist perspective. We can, of course, criticize the interpretations here as being meaningless or even ridiculous, and content ourselves with the results emerging from actual conditions. But if we want to make further strides toward understanding ancient people's patterns of thought, it is necessary to formulate new ideas about how we should go about it. Overton and Hamilakis's article is a relevant example of that.
