Beyond Literature: Archaeological and Biological Perspectives in Byzantine Human Animal Studies

The paper discusses the potentials and challenges of integrating the expanding body of archaeological evidence and insights from the natural sciences with the hitherto text-dominated research in the field of Byzantine Human Animal Studies. After an elaboration on the understanding of historically relevant actors that include autonomous humans, things and nonhuman animals, a first case study presents how zooarchaeological remains can shed light on the role of animals in defining notions of historical “space” and “place.” The next case study demonstrates how animal-focused paleopathology can enhance reconstructions of animals’ experiences and subjectivity in the past. A third part presents zoonotic diseases as an important case of human-environmental entanglement that depends on bioarchaeological insight, rather than text-based historical work. The concluding part proposes a concept of ecosystem-history that includes both biological, social and cultural factors.