The last few decades have witnessed a growing interest in the study of human-animal interactions, especially in the humanities and social sciences. This movement, sometimes referred to as the ‘animal turn’ (Ritvo, Reference Ritvo2007), has placed an increased focus on non-human animals and their practical or metaphoric function in human societies. While already in line with this trend, notably in Horse Nations (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2015), Peter Mitchell concentrates this time on an animal widely disregarded in the academic field and in society at large, the donkey. Through a wide interdisciplinary overview, he thoroughly portrays the major role played by this under-recognized animal in various aspects of the economic, social, and symbolic structure of human societies, from its domestication to today. This volume consists of eight chapters, structured chronologically, which follow the progressive diffusion of the domestic donkey from North Africa to the Near East, and then from Europe to its colonial settlements in America, South Africa, and Australia.
As exposed in the first chapter, Mitchell's purpose is twofold: first, to rehabilitate the donkey and demonstrate the role it had in many societies around the world over the last 7000 years. He thus brings to light the paradox of the historians and archaeologists’ relatively weak interest in investigating the surviving traces of donkeys, hoping thereby to encourage research into human-donkey relationships to reach the same level as that undertaken for horses and camels, which have received more attention. Second, Mitchell seeks to tell a ‘bottom-up’ history through that of an animal of low (if not marginalized) status but highly integrated in daily life. The following chapters indeed show how the history of the donkey is highly connected to that of the poorest and most oppressed classes in society.
Chapter 2 goes back to the ‘Origins’ of donkeys. It traces the evolutionary history of the genus Equus until African and Asian wild asses diverged in the early Pleistocene. In this chapter, Mitchell presents their low dietary and water needs, and their ability to move through rough terrain, as key to enabling people to reach inaccessible areas. The question of interspecific hybridization and its benefits to improve the physical, physiological, or cognitive characteristics of the livestock is then introduced and presented as already valued in the past, although its detection in the archaeological record is still challenging. The chapter concludes with a clear and exhaustive review of what is currently known and unknown about the donkey's domestication from genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data.
The next chapters follow the domesticated donkey in its progressive spread across the world, beginning with the region where the first evidence is found, the Nile valley. Chapter 3 describes the donkeys’ extensive use, since the fourth millennium bc, for transport and farming but also in terms of their religious meaning, especially through a symbolic association with the god Seth. Mitchell also emphasizes the crucial role donkey caravans played in enabling large-scale trade with the Levant and expeditions to the Western Desert, providing access to prestige goods used for religious purposes or to reinforce elite status. The chapter ends with the donkey's expansion to western and southern Egypt and presents direct and indirect evidence of its presence as far as Kenya and Tanzania. In Mitchell's opinion, endemic diseases could have contributed to confine its spread further south, a hypothesis regularly discussed in the author's own contribution to the literature (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2017).
In Chapter 4, we follow the donkey's diffusion in the Ancient Near East. The author first reviews the main evidence for its spread in western Asia, probably before the third millennium bc, to then discuss the debated chronology of its introduction further east. Mitchell's objective here is to prove, through a rich overview of historical and archaeological indicators, that the long-distance trade movements of goods established in this region rested on the donkeys’ ability to adapt to semi-arid environments and rugged terrain. In this chapter, the author also evokes the strong association between the local elites and donkeys, used for riding and placed in burials. Through this, Mitchell seeks to demonstrate that donkeys (and kúnga, their hybrids with onagers) can be considered an integral component of social and religious structuring processes, despite the introduction of the horse and camel in the region from the early second millennium bc, probably resulting in the donkeys’ replacement in some of their functions.
The following chapter (Chapter 5) focuses on the donkey in ‘The Classical World’ after its probable introduction from the Near East at the end of the third millennium bc. Mitchell begins this section by discussing the chronology of its progressive adoption along the northern shores of the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. This is followed by a comprehensive description of the archaeological evidence for the spread of donkeys in Central Europe, partly ascribed by the author to the movements of the Roman armies. Mitchell points out the major role likely to have been played also by mules in the Roman Empire, whether for military campaigns or agriculture, but rightly reminds us that the methodological difficulty in distinguishing the bones of mules from those of their parents hinders a proper assessment of their importance. From a symbolic point of view, the author admits that the donkey remains in the shadow of the horse, although its association with the god Dionysus exemplifies the persistence of a religious dimension associated with donkeys in Graeco-Roman thought.
With Chapter 6, we turn to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. On the model of the preceding sections, this chapter presents the place of the donkey in the symbolic sphere and, in this case, in the context of a shift to monotheistic religions. Mitchell chooses to entitle this section ‘The Triumph of the Mule’ to illustrate the increasing role of pack animals, now no longer restricted to Mediterranean regions after the fall of the Roman Empire. He reconsiders Bulliet's theory that wheeled vehicles were progressively replaced for transport by camels in North Africa and the Near East (Bulliet, Reference Bulliet1990), and rightly expands it to include mules and donkeys. Of particular interest in this chapter is the author's treatment of the considerable impact the mule had on societies, in addition to revolutionizing long-distance transport in Europe or across Eurasia. Indeed, Mitchell shows how the supply of mules directly influenced social structures, from the development of specialized breeding centres to the emergence of professional muleteer communities whose cultural identity is still vibrant today.
Chapter 7 is devoted to the introduction, from the end of the fifteenth century, of donkeys and mules in the ‘New Worlds’ and to their exploitation in agriculture, transport, or metal extraction in the colonial empires. Most of the examples are provided by historical sources but Mitchell strives to combine them with material data, especially indirect evidence left on the landscape by the road networks established to unify these vast territories. A large part of this chapter focuses on the place of donkeys and mules in the European colonies of America but their presence in southern Africa and Australia is also discussed. The author demonstrates how essential the presence of donkeys and mules was for the development of new economic activities in regions that were sometimes rugged or deprived of a navigable network and often subject to arid climates. Conversely, he highlights their role in giving native communities the opportunity to maintain a relative economic and cultural independence. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ecological impact of these animals in areas where they were absent in the past. It shows how environmental policies in this regard vary by region, depending on their respective historical and emotional relationships with the mule and donkey which may constitute markers of identity.
The last chapter (Chapter 8) is especially interesting for its discussion of ‘animal agency’, in which Mitchell shows the interest of questioning the perspective in which the story is told, as a way to improve our understanding of human-animal interactions. The chapter ends with the author's suggestions for further research with a list of concrete objectives which reminds us that the primary purpose of this book is to encourage research on the donkey to ‘repair the omission’.
Beyond its chronological and geographical organization, which makes this book extremely easy to navigate, the chapters are articulated around recurring themes (donkeys in daily life, trade, beliefs, social structure, etc.) that enable readers to fully appreciate both the common features and the diversity of the human-donkey relationships in various societies over time and space. Each section is replete with examples and case studies but these do not diminish the reader's attention because they are systematically included in a clear argumentation. Care is taken to provide an accurate geographic framework through numerous maps. Similarly, the requisite historical background is efficiently described at the beginning of each chapter. The chronology within the sections requires, in places, some more effort but this minor difficulty is unavoidable in view of the wide range of periods covered and the, much more relevant, thematic arrangement of the chapters. Finally, a number of pictures accompany the text and, although most are open-access greyscale photographs (except in the eight-page central spread), they properly fulfil their illustrative function. Together, this makes this book highly accessible, and therefore not only suitable for archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists, but also for anyone interested in this topic.
One of the main contributions this book makes is that it presents, for the first time, a great deal of archaeological evidence related to the presence of donkeys and mules in the past. For the bone remains, this endeavour is far from easy, especially since the absence of systematic consumption of donkey meat contributes to heterogeneous bone assemblages being recovered from archaeological sites (notably settlements). Such a synthesis thus requires scouring the list of faunal remains from a huge number of sites in search of often disparate occurrences of donkeys or mules. It is precisely what Mitchell does in a work that is impressive in its coverage of the fullest possible range of times and places associated with the history of donkeys. As regularly mentioned by the author, the lack of methods to identify equid bones from archaeological sites probably constitutes one of the main limitations to a solid overview of the donkey's presence and use in the past. In that respect, I would be more cautious than Mitchell on the issue of using bone size as a criterion for identification, especially without any reliable assessment of the variability in size of past forms of the taxa concerned. Be that as it may, the fact that the archaeological evidence is discussed here within a broader context, in combination with richly detailed historical and anthropological data, reinforces the robustness of the case.
Mitchell's book is a comprehensive overview of the role of the donkey in human history, based on a carefully crafted compilation of the archaeological evidence and its comparison with literary sources. The topic itself is original given that the donkey's history is often delivered piecemeal, hidden within that of its more popular cousin the horse. By devoting his attention exclusively to this animal, the author achieves his aim of extracting it from its anonymity and filling a significant gap in the field. But it is in fact a human history that Mitchell narrates. In his book, the local and the global mingle, showing that the role of the donkey goes beyond its use in daily life and largely contributes to shape societies. In a nutshell, I highly recommend this book; it is bound to become a key reference in the field, stimulating further research but also making us rethink our perception of the animals with which we interact.
