Staff: Garry Marvin (Project CoI), Giovanna Capponi (3 year Post Doctoral Associate), Garry Marvin and Stuart Semple, supervisors for 3 PhD students (Alex Mullan, Herre de Bondt, Helen Nakielny) included in the project.
This is a muti-institution (University of Exeter, Readinng University, National Museums of Scotland, University of Roehampton) and multidisciplinary (zooarcheology, istopic analyses, osteology, rural policy, STS, anthropology) project, funded by the Wellcome Trust. It will undertake a deep-time and cross-cultural investigation exploring the roots, and the continuing practices, of animal feeding, and critique the benefits/risks for all concerned. Particularly, we will test our hypothesis that animal domestication itself was driven by the human penchant for animal feeding and that this process is not just continuing but accelerating, with consequences for global human-animal-environmental health.