Pushing the Boundaries of Ornithoarchaeology

Birds have long appeared in accounts of the human past as food, materials, symbols, and indicators of ancient environments. These perspectives are valuable, but they can leave birds curiously passive: things people used, represented, or studied, rather than living beings with whom people shared worlds. Birds moved, bred, fed, and made places habitable for themselves; they responded to people, sometimes accommodated them, and sometimes evaded them. People, too, responded to birds. Their encounters took many forms, from capture and care to observation, coexistence, and relationships whose meanings cannot be reduced to utility. Birds also participated in the making of shared environments through their own activities, not only through their significance to humans.The methodological foundations ornithoarchaeology has built now allow us to ask not only what bird remains reveal about people and environments, but how birds themselves helped make those shared worlds. Those remains can illuminate encounters between people and birds, but an assemblage does not directly record a relationship. Avian behaviour, human actions, other accumulating agents, preservation, excavation, and identification all shape the evidence. Rather than assuming that birds were passive resources this collection asks how birds acted and responded in past worlds, how people related to them, and how we can distinguish those histories from the processes that formed the archaeological record.Ornithoarchaeology stands at an exciting juncture. Having established strong foundations in the identification and interpretation of bird remains, the field is reaching outward, embracing new technologies, questions, and collaborations that are changing what we can learn about birds, people, and past environments. Yet a central problem remains: how can we bring different kinds of evidence together to understand how birds lived, related to people, and helped shape the worlds they shared? Bird remains, images, and other traces offer different and sometimes incomplete views of those histories; changes in an assemblage may reflect changes in avian lives, human practices, or the processes that formed the record.Recent advances in taphonomy, biomolecular and isotopic analysis, and the study of eggshell and other bird-derived materials give us new ways to investigate these possibilities. Their promise is greatest when they are brought into conversation with bird biology, archaeological context, and evidence for the social and cultural dimensions of human–bird relationships. This Research Topic aims to capture that momentum in a state-of-the-art collection that not only demonstrates the breadth of ornithoarchaeology but asks what its different approaches can establish together, and where their limits remainThis Research Topic invites contributions that investigate past human–bird relationships through a multispecies approach that attends to birds’ lives as well as human practices. We welcome work on birds that were hunted, kept, traded, depicted, or encountered in everyday life, alongside studies of birds living in places altered by human activity. Papers might ask how birds responded to human practices and changing habitats; how people came to know and relate to the birds around them; or how those relationships changed across seasons, generations, and regions. We are equally interested in how birds lived alongside people, including where their distributions, behaviours, or population dynamics changed.Contributions should make clear what their evidence can show about these encounters, and what it cannot. Bird bones may be central, but eggshell, feathers, worked objects, images, written accounts, oral histories, and environmental evidence can answer questions that bones alone cannot. Reanalyses of legacy collections are also in scope, particularly where excavation, curation, or earlier identifications shape what can be inferred from them. We welcome taphonomic, biomolecular, isotopic, and other analytical approaches when they help distinguish between possible accounts of how a record formed or what a relationship involved. We also welcome work that asks whether changes in archaeological bird assemblages reflect changes in avian populations and habitats, changes in human practice, or both. Original studies, comparative papers, critical reviews, and methodological or theoretical contributions are all in scope. Topic editors: Linda Amos, Catherine Ujma, Anne Birgitte Gotfredsen Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84407/pushing-the-boundaries-of-ornithoarchaeology