Theo McLeod Kassebaum

This project examines the faunal remains of livestock¬–cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs–at the Iron Age I (ca. 1200 – 980/950 BCE) site of Tel Abel Beth Maacah, to better understand how living animals were cared for within the social networks of a multispecies urban community. Livestock are capable of simultaneously performing subsistence, social, and emotional roles but are often flattened in archeological analysis to their position in subsistence economies. Critically, livestock are regularly engaged in practices of care–such as foddering, milking, and draught work–which vary by the age, sex, and species of the animal. The repetition of these human-animal interactions results in skeletal markers in the form of pathologies. This project connects the care of living animals to zooarchaeological evidence of pathologies and demographic profiles to produce a replicable way to approach ancient animals in their role as living participants within diverse multispecies communities. I explore how livestock herds were entangled in varied and distinct practices of care across the archaeological site. By analyzing cultic and non-cultic faunal assemblages I will ascertain how livestock experienced different forms of care based on the intended postmortem deposit, with an emphasis on the living rather than dead animal.