Multispecies Pasts and the Possibilities of Multispecies Futures in the Age of the Anthropocene

Abstract

The Anthropocene emerges as an aftermath of the long-held, pervasive belief in human exceptionalism, and a wake-up call to reconsider our being in the world as entangled with a plethora of other living selves. Along with ecological and social challenges facing all life on Earth, the very boundaries between Nature and Culture, biological and social, human and nonhuman are being destabilized. From an archaeological perspective, particularly relevant is the understanding of diachronic change through shifting webs of interspecies relations (sensu Tsing). By engaging with various strands of thought within archaeology, anthropology, ecology and ethology, this paper aims to offer a more inclusive, multispecies view of the past. Ultimately, a consideration of human and nonhuman histories as entangled, bears important implications for multispecies futures.

Human-beaver cohabitation in the Early and Mid-Holocene of Northern Europe: Re-visiting Mesolithic material culture and ecology through a multispecies lens

“…Given the recent surge of attention on beavers’ conservationist capacities, and the hope they continue to spark in the Anthropocene (e.g. Woelfle-Erskine, 2019), it is thus informative and timely to revisit the archaeology of human-beaver relations, to interrogate the long-term dynamics and legacies of human-beaver co-living, and to ask what we can learn from the respective interspecies pasts that come into view in this way, as they have been argued to bear important implications for possible and imaginable multispecies futures (Živaljević, 2021).…”