Hannah Chazin, PhD

Department of Anthropology,

Columbia University

The archaeology of politics has spent the last couple of decades grappling with how to incorporate nonhumans into our understandings of political life in the past. Non-human animals’ (especially domesticated livestock's) exclusion from models of the political is somewhat different from other categories of nonhumans that have received greater attention in archaeological theory to date. This talk introduces a performative approach to politics, one which allows me to rethink the roles that domesticated herd animals played in political life in the past. I discuss the importance of processes of fractal recursion, a powerful form of semiotic recontextualization and sorting, which have a key role in the performative production of both relations of belonging and exclusion and relations between rulers and ruled. I discuss the archaeological evidence for processes of fractal recursion in stock in human-herd animal relations in the Late Bronze Age (1500-1100 BCE) South Caucasus. In addition to providing a new theoretical approach to political life in the past, the concept of fractal recursion also has interesting methodological implications for the work of archaeological knowledge production, by highlighting the specific nature of potential gaps between the salient categories of social analysis in the present and those that may have operated in the past.