Conference Agenda

Isotopic zooarchaeology has significant potential to move beyond ‘animals-as-meat/products’ perspectives, to explore the manifold ways that humans and animals interacted in the past. This is because isotopic evidence foregrounds animal lives rather than deaths. Whereas osteological approaches often necessarily focus on how animal lives end, isotopic patterns reflect more of animals’ lived experiences – places they lived/moved and trends in what they ate, over multi-year periods. We explore what is likely the world’s largest single-city isotopic-zooarchaeological archive, including nearly 3000 animals, most of whom lived their lives in the vicinity of eighteenth-to-nineteenth-century NOLA. Stable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotopic compositions offer new perspectives onto aspects of animal movement and ecology. While these data offer useful windows onto aspects of trade, husbandry, and migration, they also provide opportunities to contextualize landscape-change processes and the social and agential roles animals played as urban and rural landscapes –co-created by people and animals– unfolded.

Postbellum New Orleans witnessed significant economic and infrastructural growth and a flurry of cultural changes in music, recreation, and festivities. The one steadfast character in all of this was the Mule, a non-human animal derived from human intervention, whose hybrid vigor they became the city’s linchpin labor source. Physical and socio-cultural artifacts of the New Orleans cityscape reiterate that the human-equine dynamic was not one-sided; their needs and presence, no matter how aesthetically or economically inconvenient, affected the daily lives of locals from all backgrounds. Though the Mule's impact in New Orleans is historically significant, their role has been severely overlooked. This paper provides a brief but necessary spatial history of the rise of the Mule in postbellum New Orleans, examining how the animals affected the physical and cultural cityscape through stabling and sales locales, portage and streetcar networks, sanitation (or lack of), and Carnival parades.

Disasters, in both the modern era and historically, are not static occurrences. Disasters are social experiences that affect individuals and communities in a variety of ways. While our modern perceptions of disasters include the social, emotional, and cultural aftereffects of a disaster, the same considerations are rarely granted to historical disasters. One arena that is often overlooked in disaster situations, even in the modern era, is the loss of commensal animals. In zooarchaeological analysis, commensal animals, scavengers, and other non-food specimens are regularly notated but rarely examined beyond such designations. This paper will consider the relationships between humans and animals in disaster situations. In particular, this paper will examine zooarchaeological specimens from a site in the historic French Quarter that was destroyed in the 1788 fire. This research will show how zooarchaeologists may approach household or domestic assemblages in a more comprehensive manner.

During excavations in the garden behind New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral in 2008 and 2009, we unexpectedly found the carefully buried remains of a domestic cat and a pet dog in contexts dating from the early and mid 20th century. Such burials are consistent with a wider practice of smuggling pets into sacred spaces and human cemeteries in the United States that dates back to at least the Victorian period. I argue that the relationship of human mortuary practices to those for beloved pets is a dynamic one that is about more than anthropomorphism. Further, they indicate that ontological beliefs about “spirits” is far more lively – and animistic – in our familiar world than is commonly acknowledged. In this paper, I contextualize the archaeology of pet burials with findings from my recent ethnographic work on contemporary American death practices.

Entrepreneurs introduced nutria to Louisiana early in the twentieth century in the hopes of reestablishing a diminished fur market. Soon, the unwanted animal overpopulated the coastal regions of the state. State and federal actors unsuccessfully attempted various methods to increase the value of nutria. In 1958 the state legislature took action in a bill passed the next year that proposed a bounty on the animal while also removing it from the status of a protected furbearer. This action forever marked the animal as a pest. A “golden age” of nutria trapping arrived in the late 1960s and 1970s and nutria transformed to a respectable target. However, due to global changes in the climate and the international fur market, once again, by the 1980s the animal overpopulated the coast of Louisiana. The state responded by again passing a bounty on the animal funded as part of larger efforts of coastal restoration.

Throughout the colonial period, plantations played an important role in shaping the social and economic landscape of early New Orleans. The developing economies of these early plantations relied heavily on the exploitation of wild animals for food, but animals were exploited for purposes beyond pure sustenance. Excavations at a colonial plantation in the neighborhood of Faubourg Tremé revealed an abundance of small wild birds; these birds and their feathers were likely to have been used in fashion and millinery. This paper examines the relationship between wild birds and the city’s early residents – both free and unfree – to consider how the specialized knowledge of local ecologies allowed enslaved people to insert themselves in the city’s expanding markets, affecting change in Creole aesthetics and taste-making. In doing so, I argue that birds and their feathers were more than raw materials, they were an active force that spurred the colonial imagination.