Evin Frances Grody

EVIN GRODY, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was approved funding in October 2019 to aid research on “Animal Use as Craft Practice: Reassessing Animal Procurement and Processing in the Zambian Iron Age,” supervised by Dr. Zoe Crossland. The different labor, technological, and economic practices within the umbrella of “animal use” — hunting, herding, quotidian food preparation, intensive production, general or specialised butchery tools — directly shape how animal use intersects with other craft and production practices. Animals are uniquely placed to bring craft conversations together: where the metal butchery knife or flaked stone meets the herded or hunted animal flesh bound for the ceramic cooking vessel. This project analyzed animal bones from a 9th to 10th century CE period at Kalala Island, Zambia, to situate it within the diverse types of animal use seen in the South and Central African Iron Age around the turn of the first to second millennium CE. Specifically, the research focused on coupling data from the species chosen, how their bodies were prepared and processed, and the tools and techniques used to do to reconstruct a detailed picture of precisely how humans, animals, and technology shaped each other at Kalala Island. From there, the direct material connections and interactions to other crafts (e.g. metallurgy) and sites will be further examined to build out our understanding of the constellations of practice at this site within the Iron Age.