engleski

Dogs on crossroads – from hunter’s best friend to farmer's best fiend?

The transition from hunters and gatherers to farming communities, from Mesolithic to Neolithic, is often considered to be associated with significant changes to human-animal relationships, sometimes as a fundamental break from perceiving animals as a different kind of person to seeing them as property. On one hand, such general notions require further questioning while on the other, dogs as animals “filling virtually every role in the whole spectrum of human–animal relationships” (Russell 2012, 280) might be a rather exceptional case in discussions of how animals were placed Mesolithic and Neolithic worldviews. Nevertheless, it has been proposed with reference to Northern Europe that social and cosmological importance of dogs linked in particular with their role as hunting aids significantly declines with the end of Mesolithic into the following Neolithic period where dogs now occupy a less central position among other domesticated species. Referring to a wider variety of possible human - dog relationships the paper aims to explore continuity or change in how dogs were placed in worldviews of Mesolithic and Neolithic communities across northern parts of Europe. The contribution will utilise ethnographic evidence from East Siberian indigenous groups to highlight a complex, nuanced and ambivalent nature of human-animal relationships with dogs often closely related to notions of care and control and increase archaeological awareness of these possibilities. The corpus of ethnographic data refers to East Siberian indigenous people (Nivkhs, Nanai, Udege, Ulchi) that have not received much attention in Anglophone hunter-gatherer literature and in comparison to some other Siberian groups have been less visible in related anthropological or archaeological comparative discussions. While some contexts may reveal respectful yet diverse treatments of the dogs where they could be understood as animals simply caught up in mutual "joie de vivre" interactions with human others or working companions others may indicate the violence and unequal power in human-animal relationships. The multitude and variety of archaeological evidence for distribution, placement and treatment of dog remains throughout Mesolithic and Neolithic Europe allow such possibilities to be manifested through material culture as well.

dogs, Mesolithic, Neolithic, ethnography, East Siberia, care, control

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