This inaugural issue of Animal History offers a welcome opportunity to query the troubled relationship between historical and archaeological scholarship with regard to other animals—how we portray and write about them, how they figure in prevalent ideas of pastness, and what they reveal about our own positionalities and preoccupations. I begin with a basic observation: notwithstanding the recent surge of attention to animal matters in archaeology, these discussions rarely draw on animal history literatures and are predominantly framed as part of a “multi-species” venture. There is at present no “animal prehistory,” in other words, to complement the now well-established field of animal history and to build new animal-oriented alliances across the historical sciences. But why is this the case? And what can this situation tell us about animal archaeologies as they currently take shape? Attending to such questions is not merely a scholastic exercise but can play an important role in strengthening and revising the “animal lens” in both disciplines, thereby nurturing the ambition of a truly transepochal animal-oriented research program at the intersection of history and archaeology. Such a research program comprising and re-articulating what is sometimes also called “shallow” and “deep history” is needed to satisfy some of the broader ambitions and goals of the original “animal turn” across the humanities, and may also help to better engage with a range of thorny problems that plague the study of animal pasts.
In what follows, I take a critical look at multi-species archaeology and the opportunities, challenges, and limits of animal-oriented scholarship in order to distill the contours of what may be termed “animal prehistory.” The question of animal prehistory is brought up not because there is need to coin yet another animal archaeology term but rather to draw attention to shared sensibilities and complications vis-à-vis engaging with animal pasts at the history-archaeology nexus. I argue that some of these issues are currently not at the center of archaeological attention, rendering the idea of animal prehistory a useful foil to unearth and belabor them. I am particularly critical of archaeologists’ tendency to table animal archaeologies in continuity to—or as a logical progression of—particular kinds of zooarchaeology and the related proclivity to picture such archaeologies primarily as projects of positivist science, with little consideration of animal archaeologies as a form of literature and critical history-writing. My contestation is that animal archaeologies, by attending chiefly to zooarchaeology as well as posthuman, ontological, and feminist perspectives devised by scholars foremostly interested in the present and future of how we think about and interact with other animals, seem to have largely lost sight of the very problem of the “historical animal” itself. Making space for such animal historicity, however, is necessary to evade the pitfalls of presentism, and opens up a critical space of interdisciplinary exchange between historians and archaeologists. This paper is my humble attempt to work toward such a space of productive debate and interaction.
