Worlds entwined Exploring the lived experiences of sheep, horses and dogs in later Iron Age Scandinavia through the lens of archaeoethology

Categorising animals based on what humans may have done to them centres humans as the sole agents of history and reduces animals to proxies for dietary preferences, socioeconomic activities, ritual customs, and representations of belief systems.

However, a growing body of theory and evidence suggests that animal-human relationships in the past were nuanced and complex, and that animals played an active role in shaping human societies. This thesis explores that nuance and complexity in the context of later Iron Age Scandinavia (c. 400-1100 CE) by utilising a post-anthropocentric and multidisciplinary approach, combining zooarchaeological methods, archaeological theory, and ethological research to centre animal experiences in the narrative.<br>A novel theoretical framework called ‘archaeoethology’ is developed and applied to two related datasets to explore the lived experiences of sheep, horses and dogs: a large-scale quantitative analysis of faunal remains from selected late Iron Age sites in Sweden and Denmark and a higher-resolution qualitative analysis of five case studies.