'Animal Use as Craft Practice: Reassessing Animal Procurement and Processing in the Zambian Iron Age'

I will be exploring the value of assessing animal procurement and processing techniques as craft practices in their own right. Drawing on Iron Age assemblages housed at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, this project seeks to investigate both the as-yet-unexplained faunal diversity at Iron Age sites as well as how those animal use strategies intersected with other craft and production practices. Altogether, it examines how understanding the labour, technology, and knowledge invested in animal use may shed light on the wide array of economic, technological, and sociopolitical developments seen during the mid-first through mid-second millennium CE in Southern and South-Central Africa. In so doing, it proposes that attention to both animals and hinterland spaces may be crucial for understanding this period of widespread change and local variation. This project contributes to broader anthropological discussions of food production, animal processing technologies, specialization and intensification, social complexity, and human-animal relationships via the lens of craft production.