From Hunting to Herding: The Emergence of Animal Domestication in Southwest Asia, a talk by Natalie Munro (University of Connecticut)

Date: 

Thursday, October 21, 2021, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Zoom, registration required

 

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ABSTRACT - Animal domestication is increasingly viewed as a multiregional process that emerged gradually at varying rates in different areas of Southwest Asia. Evidence also increasingly suggests that the very difficult to detect first stirrings of animal management had earlier origins that once imagined. This presentation considers evidence for the early emergence of animal management using examples from the southern Levant and Central Anatolia. The data emphasizes diverse pathways to animal domestication that were deeply influenced by local ecology and social conditions, and the transmission of information across large social networks.

Natalie Munro is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona (Ph.D.), Simon Fraser University (M.A.) and Southern Methodist University (B.S). Munro studies the transition from foraging to farming societies in Southwest Asia using ancient animal remains. She is most interested in the formative conditions of agriculture and animal domestication. She connects large zooarchaeological databases from individual sites to broader themes such as human demography, animal domestication, sedentarization, and the emergence of public ritual practice at a regional scale. Munro has active research projects in Turkey, Israel and Greece and is published widely in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, PNAS, Current Anthropology, and Journal of Human Evolution. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

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