The tendency for archaeology to view the past as an early developmental stage of the present, whether longingly or with disdain, has narrowed interpretations of ancient societies. This is particularly true for stage theories of ancient subsistence, which describe settlements using discrete, stepwise categories of food production, often replicating neo-evolutionary models of development and based largely on the assumptions of rational, economic individuals of the past. In Live Stock and Dead Things: The Archaeology of Zoopolitics between Domestication and Modernity, Hannah Chazin situates pastoralism within these models, arguing for a more detailed consideration of the practices, relations, and processes involved in ancient herding. Using her case study of cattle, sheep, and goat remains from the Late Bronze Age (1500–1100 BC) in the Tsaghkahovit Plain of the South Caucasus, located in modern-day Armenia, Chazin advocates for viewing ancient nonhuman animals not only as economic units of material wealth but also as subjects involved in the shaping of politics of the ancient world.

In her first chapter, Chazin describes standard archaeological models of pastoralism as a “flyover history”: an often-overlooked intermediary step in stage theories linking early phases of plant and animal domestication to intensive agriculture and used as a causal explanation for later industrialization. Subsistence stages, then, are seen as developmental steps, and steps closer to modernity are often treated as more complex or more civilized than those preceding them. Chazin moves readers away from categories of domesticates versus nondomesticates to emphasize instead the processes of domestication, with pastoralism and secondary product acquisition viewed not just as stepping-stones toward modernity and industrialism but also as their own avenues for development.

The second chapter focuses on human and animal “relations of use” as an alternative to characterizing the history of animal domestication as one of objectification, in which animals are viewed as nonsubjects, often as machines or products acted upon by humans. Instead, through “relations of use,” Chazin gives equal measure to the actions of care in human–animal relations, considering property, accumulation, and labor, as well as eating and feeding, labor and reproduction, and pre- and postmortem lives.

Chazin’s third chapter discusses ideas such as affiliation–distinction and authorization–subjection to characterize human–animal relationships as practices of social and political consequence, with shifting scales and positions in social assemblages for both humans and nonhumans. Chazin moreover illustrates the ways in which foddering animals acts as a transfer of labor between human and nonhuman subjects and how pastoralism is as much an exploration of labor relations as it is one of food production.

The following four chapters discuss the faunal evidence from the Late Bronze Age sites of the Tsaghkahovit Residential Complex and Gegharot: these are two contemporaneous yet separate clusters of burials and walled sites with distinct material cultures and interpreted as two different but integrated communities or polities. Chazin’s fifth chapter is, in some ways, her most absorbing one, exploring Tsaghkahovit milk production through stable oxygen isotopes and herd animal molars. Her findings reveal precocious practices of birth seasonality extension, a practice for year-round milk production often deemed to be highly modern. Here, Chazin’s critical lens of zooarchaeological and economic theory extends to the history of milk, specifically in the United States, and how the economics of modern milk production, steeped in classism, white supremacy, and capitalism, have altered understandings of ancient milk production and reproductive labor. She argues against economic-maximizing models for meat and milk production in prehistory, drawing attention to the high human and animal labor costs involved in extending animal birth seasonality.

Chazin’s final chapters explore the overrepresentation of certain bone elements in the faunal assemblage—namely, mandibles, astragali, and calcanei—to illustrate the politics and actions of value behind relations of pre- and postmortem animals with humans. She considers various trajectories—or “choreographies,” as she puts it—of the lives of animals, both before and after death, which are closely tied to negotiations and renegotiations of value and authority.

Chazin’s examination of the Late Bronze Age faunal assemblages from the Tsaghkahovit Plain is thorough, including analyses of isotopic, taphonomic, and quantitative data. She questions existing interpretive frameworks, such as secondary products revolutions, meat-maximizing models, survival curves, wealth-in-animals, and larger theoretical models passing over the unique history of postdomestication, premodern societies. Above all, Chazin encourages readers to be surprised, alongside her, by the nuances of zooarchaeological data and the unique role of herd animals in the political world of the South Caucasus. She leads by example, in forgoing assumptions of zooarchaeology, such as neo-evolutionary stage theories and economic-maximizing models, and instead invites the animal bones to tell her and her readers something new about affiliation and authority across species lines.