I began the project by reading around the
subject and considering what it is about the bones of animals that interests
me.
In my reading, I came across a number of
interesting articles and books about archaeology and art, materiality and how
we perceive objects. All very interesting, but one thing struck me – in all my
reading, animal bones were always considered in the same vein as other
archaeological artefacts; bones appeared in lists of finds amongst things like
pottery, tools or items of jewellery, without any acknowledgement of their
difference.
For me, bones are different. They are not
artefacts in that they have not been crafted by humans (although some are used
to make other artefacts such as tools or adornments, but are modified for
this). Animal bones have had a former life, possibly untouched by humans for
all or some part of it. The animal itself had agency. It had its own biography.
It had relations and an origin.
Interestingly, the field of archaeology is,
in the USA, considered a branch of anthropology. Archaeology is the study of
human lives through the discovery and interpretation of remains. Thus animal
bones have come to be seen through the lense of the study of human culture, and
have been thought of and written about as just another kind of object in the
human story. But there is animal story there. What happens if we look at the
story from the point of view of the animal?
I’ve been rummaging through the boxes in
the collection at the University, sifting my way through like a bone picker
looking for something useful, intrigued
by the curious interior shapes of all sorts of creatures.
I have decided to keep away from skulls for
now. Skulls are already quite a fetishised object and perhaps too evocative;
they appear too frequently in scenes of superstitious devilry or as gothic
emblems or heavy metal t-shirts. For now I prefer the more abstract shaped
bones, the ones that I’m not sure which part of a body they might be from, the
ones that make me marvel at how they evolved and how alien some of the species
of this planet are to me.
I will start by just getting to know them.
